Key fortress: history of Shlisselburg. Fortress Oreshek and its history Fortress Oreshek now

FOUNDATION AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE ORESTHEK FORTRESS

Shlisselburg Fortress (Oreshek) is a monument of Russian defense architecture. The history of the fortress in the distant past of the border stronghold of Novgorod is closely connected with the struggle of the Russian people for lands along the banks of the Neva and the Gulf of Finland, which the Swedish conquerors sought to reclaim.
In 1323, Prince Yuri Danilovich, the grandson of Alexander Nevsky, built a wooden fortress on the small Orekhovoy Island at the source of the Neva, which was named after its location Orekhovaya or Oreshkoy. The Novgorod Chronicle records this event: “In the summer of 6831 (1323 AD). Novgorodians walked with Prince Yuri and built a city at the mouth of the Neva, on Orekhovoy Island.”
When choosing a place for construction, the Novgorodians took into account the natural security and inaccessibility of the island: it is separated from the mainland by two wide, strong-flowing channels of the Neva. The wooden fortress was surrounded by an earthen rampart. The nut blocked the northern neighbors, the Swedes, from entering Lake Ladoga. This made it possible for the Novgorodians to retain the route along the Neva to the Gulf of Finland, which was important for Novgorod’s trade with the countries of Western Europe.
The Novgorod chronicles tell about the stubborn struggle of the Novgorodians with the Swedes for the possession of Oreshok. In August 1348, Swedish troops approached Oreshk. Lithuanian Prince Narimont, the military leader of the Orekhovites, was in Lithuania. The Swedes managed to capture the fortress. But they didn’t last long in Oreshka. Militia from various Russian cities gathered in Ladoga, and on February 24, 1349, the Russians recaptured Oreshek. During the battle, the wooden fortress burned down.
Three years later, on the site of the burnt wooden fortress, the Novgorodians built a new one in Orekhov, this time a stone one. The construction was led by the head of the Novgorod Republic, Archbishop Vasily.
The remains of the walls of the stone fortress from 1352 were discovered in 1968-1969. The fortress was located on a hill in the southeastern part of the island, occupying approximately a fifth of it. In plan it had the shape of an irregular triangle. The builders took into account the features of the terrain: two walls - eastern and southern - followed the curves of the island’s coastline. The fortress walls, 351 meters long, 5-6 meters high, about 3 meters wide, were made of large boulders and lime slabs with lime mortar. The foundation was made of three rows of boulders laid on clay. Along the top of the walls there was a battle passage with square loopholes.
The fortress had three squat rectangular towers that rose above the walls. The gate tower stood almost in the center of the northern wall, the other two were located in the southwestern and northeastern corners. A fragment of the northern wall of the Novgorod fortress of 1352 with the Gate Tower was preserved and became one of the valuable exhibits of the museum exhibition.
Along the western wall of ancient Oreshek, 25 meters from it, a three-meter wide canal ran, crossing the island from north to south (filled up at the beginning of the 18th century). The canal separated the fortress from the settlement, which occupied the entire western part of the island. In 1410, the pasad was also surrounded by a wall that followed the curves of the coastline. The courtyard of the fortress and the pasad were closely built up with one-story wooden houses in which warriors, farmers and fishermen, merchants and artisans lived.
The fortress of 1352 is a typical military-defensive structure of the pre-gun period. This is evidenced by its layout, the curvilinearity of the walls, the location of the towers - they only slightly protrude beyond the front line of the walls.
By the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, when powerful artillery began to be used during the siege of fortresses, the walls and towers of Oreshek, built by the Novgorodians long before the advent of firearms, ceased to correspond to the new military equipment. At that time, the fortress was already the possession of the Moscow centralized state. In 1478, Novgorod the Great lost its political independence. His lands became part of the Moscow centralized state. At the direction of the Moscow government, fortification work began on the radical reconstruction of all former Novgorod fortresses - Ladoga, Yama, Koporye, Oreshka. This reconstruction was supposed to ensure their defense capability in the face of the use of firearms.
The old Novgorod-built Orekhovskaya fortress was dismantled almost to its foundation, and a new powerful stronghold rose on the island. The walls and towers of Oreshok from the beginning of the 16th century have been significantly altered and have survived to this day.
In plan, the fortress was an elongated hexagon, the sides of which almost repeated the outlines of a small island. It consisted of two parts: the “city” itself and an additional fortification inside it - the citadel.
Seven towers of the city:
1) Royal
2) Flag
3) Golovkin
4) Unnamed
5) Golovin
6) Sovereign
7) Menshikova

All towers were erected along the entire perimeter of the walls at approximately equal distances from each other (an average of 80 meters). The citadel was defended by three towers - Svetlichnaya, Kolokolnaya (Chasovaya), Melnichnaya. Only six towers have survived to this day. The remaining four were dismantled to the foundation.
On the northern side of the fortress, facing the right channel of the Neva, two towers were erected - Menshikov and the State - gate. To the west of the Gosudareva is the most powerful of the towers - Golovina; a two-meter extension was made to its walls in 1583. The tower defended the approaches to the fortress from the mouth of the Neva. From its upper tier the shores were clearly visible, so a guard post was located here.
The southern, most vulnerable side of the fortress, facing the left channel of the Neva with small islands on which guns could be placed and fired at the fortress, was protected by the Bezymyannaya and Golovkina towers. On the south-eastern and north-eastern corners of the fortress stood the Flagnaya and Royal towers. Strongly pushed forward beyond the front line of the walls, both towers were well suited for conducting frontal and flanking fire.
All towers, except the Sovereign tower, which is rectangular in plan, are round. Their diameter at the bottom reaches 16 meters, the thickness of the walls is about 4.5 meters. Diameter interior spaces the lower tier is about 6 meters for all towers. Only at the Royal Tower it is larger - 8 meters. The height of the towers reached 14-16 meters. All of them were topped with hipped roofs.
Each tower had 4 floors (tiers), or as they said in ancient times, a battle. The lower tier, or footwall, of each tower is covered with a stone vault. The second, third and fourth tiers were separated from each other by wooden floorings - bridges. Stairs laid out in the thickness of the walls led from tier to tier. The towers had slit-like loopholes, 5-6 in each tier. To ensure uniform coverage of the space in front of the towers, the loopholes in different tiers were slightly offset in relation to each other. Most of the towers at the level of the second tier on the side of the fortress yard had doorways for ventilation and lifting ammunition. Entrances to the towers were located at ground level.

The entrance to the fortress was on the first floor of the Sovereign Tower. It was not through, as usual in fortresses, but curved at a right angle. This enhanced the defensive power of the passage tower: the curvature of the passage made it difficult to use rams. The gates were located in the western and southern walls. In addition to the gates, the passage was also closed with lowering forged gratings - gers. The approaches to the western gate were blocked by a palisade, a ditch connecting to the Neva, and a drawbridge. The space in front of the entrance was shot through both from the tower loopholes and from the foot loophole of the fortress wall. At the beginning of the 18th century, during the construction of the palisade in front of the tower, the palisade was dismantled, and a century later the ditch was filled in, the drawbridge and gers were removed.
The Sovereign's Tower was restored by restorers.
The total length of the fortress walls (with towers) is 740 meters, their height is 12 meters, and the thickness of the masonry at the base is 4.5 meters. A covered military passage was built along the top of the walls, which had a connection with the towers and connected all defense points. At the beginning of the 19th century it was dismantled down to the base of the loopholes. Currently, the battle passage has been restored on the wall between the Sovereign Tower and the Golovin Tower.
The walls and towers of Oreshok are made of limestone. The outer surfaces of the walls consist of properly hewn blocks, and the space between them is filled with slab backfill.
In the north-eastern corner of the fortress there is a small citadel - a fortress within a fortress, separated from the rest of the territory by a 12-meter canal (filled up in 1882) and protected by its walls with three towers. Each tower of the citadel had a specific purpose: Svetlichnaya protected the entrance to the citadel, the bell tower had a superstructure for the messenger bell, which was later replaced by a clock, there was a windmill on Melnichnaya at the beginning of the 18th century. Of the citadel towers, only one survived - Svetlichnaya.
Within the walls of the citadel - between the Melnichnaya, Kolokolnaya and Svetlichnaya towers - there were vaulted galleries in which supplies of food and ammunition were stored.
A wooden drawbridge was thrown across the canal that went around the citadel on the western and southern sides, which in case of danger closed the entrance arch in the citadel wall. In addition, the entrance was closed by gates and a lowering grate. Gersa was removed in 1816.
All the towers of the citadel were connected by a battle passage,<<влаз>> which was attached to the western wall in the courtyard of the citadel. In the same wall there was a small light room - a living quarters for the military commander (from which the tower standing nearby received its name). Under the lighthouse there was an isolated vaulted chamber - possibly a warehouse or shelter.
The citadel's defense system was rational. In the courtyard of the citadel, in front of the entrance to the Mill Tower, a well was dug. In the eastern wall, near the Royal Tower, there was an emergency exit to Lake Ladoga, protected by a gate and a gersa (in the 18th century, during the construction of the Old Prison building, the passage was closed).
The canal not only blocked the approaches to the citadel, but also served as an inner harbor. Through<<водные>> the gate, the arch of which is laid out in the thickness of the northern fortress wall adjacent to the Svetlichnaya Tower, ships entered this harbor.
In the 16th century, there was only one stone building inside the fortress - the single-apse Church of the Savior (dismantled in the 70s of the 18th century).
Oreshek of the 16th century is a typical Russian city, the administrative and military center of a vast area. There was only a garrison inside the fortress. The civilian, townspeople population - farmers, merchants, artisans - lived on both banks of the Neva - on the Korelskaya and Lopskaya sides (now the village of Sheremetyevka and the city of Shlisselburg). Communication with the fortress was carried out using boats. When the enemy approached, the townspeople hurried to take cover behind the fortress walls.
According to the Scribe Book, created around 1500, based on information from the 1480s, there were 202 households in Oreshka. in terms of the number of households, it was larger than Ladoga and Koporye and only slightly inferior to Yam. Orekhovsky district, which apparently existed since the 15th century, occupied a large territory. It included 20 villages, 1274 hamlets and 3030 households, mostly with a Russian population.
The new Orekhovskaya fortress, built at the beginning of the 16th century, taking into account new combat techniques, could withstand prolonged shelling from strong artillery. During the reconstruction of Oreshok, the builders applied new solutions characteristic of fortresses of the late 16th - early 16th centuries - geometric layout, protrusion of the towers beyond the front line of the wall, their rhythmic arrangement along the entire perimeter of the walls, tiered towers, thoughtful design of the battle passage, loopholes, stone stairs. The nut, according to eyewitnesses, was impregnable. Thus, the Swedish nobleman Peter Petrey, who visited Russia in 1614, wrote that the fortress “can be captured either by famine or by agreement.”
The walls of Oreshok have repeatedly witnessed the unparalleled heroism of the Russian people. In 1555 and 1581, Swedish troops stormed the fortress, but were forced to retreat with heavy losses. In May 1612, after a nine-month siege, they still managed to capture Oreshek. Of the thousand defenders of the fortress, only about a hundred people survived - the rest died of illness and hunger during the siege.
During the 90-year period of ownership of the fortress, which the Swedes renamed Notoeburg, they did not carry out new construction, but only repaired the walls and towers and built up the fortress yard. In 1686-1697 they dismantled and rebuilt the Royal Tower. This is the only capital structure from the period of the Swedish occupation.
The towers and walls of the fortress have changed a lot over the five centuries of its existence. Their lower parts are hidden by bastions and curtains of the 18th century, the upper parts up to a height of three meters were dismantled in 1816-1820. As already mentioned, four of the ten towers were dismantled to the ground, and those that survived completely lost their upper tiers. The fortress was greatly damaged by enemy artillery shelling during the Great Patriotic War. And yet, through all the destruction and loss, the unique appearance of the former stronghold and the power of its fortifications emerge quite clearly.
During the Northern War (1700-1721), the liberation of Oreshek was one of the main tasks, since it was this fortress that opened for Russia access to the Baltic Sea, vital for the development of the country.
The task before Peter I was difficult. By the beginning of the 18th century, the Noteburg fortress was still quite defensible. In addition, the Swedes dominated Lake Ladoga, and the island position of the nut made taking possession of the fortress especially difficult. The garrison of the fortress, led by the commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Gustav von Schlippenbach, numbered about 500 people and had 140 guns. Being protected by powerful fortress walls, He could offer stubborn resistance to the Russian troops. The difficulty of capturing the fortress was aggravated by the fact that the Russians did not have a fleet. In preparation for the assault on Oreshok, Peter I ordered the construction of two ships in Arkhangelsk. With great difficulty, dragging through the taiga and swamps of Karelia, bands of Belozersk, Kargopol and Onega peasants and Pomors dragged them to Lake Onega. Then the ships were launched. They passed Lake Onega, Svir, and went to Ladoga. The journey from Arkhangelsk to the sources of the Neva took almost two months. The first Russian troops led by Peter appeared near Noteburg on September 26. About four thousand soldiers and officers came with Peter. In total, in the army of Sheremetev, who was officially the commander-in-chief of the Russian army near Noteburg, there were 14 regiments, including the Semenovsky and Preobrazhensky guards. The campaign from Arkhangelsk, which the Russians made in 1702, was very difficult. During this campaign, the Guards regiments lost over half of their personnel due to illness.
On September 27, the siege of the fortress began. Russian regiments camped on Mount Preobrazhenskaya. Opposite the fortress, on the left bank of the Neva, they installed their batteries. Then, under the direct supervision of Peter himself, boats were dragged from Lake Ladoga along the banks of the Neva through a three-verst forest clearing. On October 1, at dawn, a thousand soldiers of the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky regiments crossed on these boats to the right bank of the Neva.
With the help of boats, they built a floating bridge across the Neva to communicate Russian troops on the right and left banks. The fortress was surrounded.
On the same day, October 1, when Peter’s troops occupied the right bank and blocked the approaches to the fortress along the Neva, “a trumpeter was sent to the commandant with an offer to surrender the fortress to an agreement.” Schlippenbach asked for a delay of four days in order to communicate with the Narva commandant. But the Swedish garrison was denied such an opportunity. At four o'clock in the afternoon, Russian batteries opened fire on the fortress with cannonballs and bombs. The bombing continued continuously for 11 days, until the assault.
As a result of continuous shelling of the fortress walls and towers, wooden buildings in the fortress caught fire on October 6. The Swedes barely managed to extinguish the fire, which threatened to explode the gunpowder warehouse.
From October 7, decisive preparations for the assault began. By this time, three huge, but too high, gaps had been punched in the fortress wall between the Golovin and Bezymyannaya towers and in the towers themselves.
The assault on the fortress began on October 11 at 2 am. Immediately before it began, Russian artillery fired several shots at the fortress with “fiery” cannonballs, which caused a strong fire. Then the first “hunters” - paratroopers - crossed to the island by boat.
The assault lasted continuously for 13 hours. The stairs made to climb the fortress walls turned out to be short. They did not allow the attackers to climb to the top. Hemmed in on a strip of land between the fortress walls and towers and the Neva, Russian soldiers heroically withstood the heavy fire of the Swedish garrison and suffered significant losses.
Peter I sent an officer to the island with an order to the commander of the assault detachment, Lieutenant Colonel of the Semenovsky regiment M. M. Golitsyn, to retreat. Golitsyn answered the messenger: “Tell the Tsar that now I am no longer his, but God’s,” and ordered the boats to be pushed away from the island. The assault continued. Buckshot, red-hot cannonballs, and lit bombs rained down on the Russians from above, but they survived.
When Second Lieutenant A.D. crossed to the island with a detachment of volunteers from the Semenovsky Regiment to help Golitsyn’s detachment. Menshikov, the Swedes wavered. Commandant Schlippenbach at five o'clock in the afternoon ordered the drums to be beaten, which meant the surrender of the fortress.
The Swedish historian Munthe wrote that as a result of the shelling, over 6 thousand bombs and more than 10 thousand shells hit the fortress, it was badly damaged, and the garrison suffered heavy losses. This forced Schlippenbach to capitulate.
Negotiations on the terms of surrender of the fortress passed very quickly. The surrender of the fortress into the hands of the Russians took place on October 14. The vanquished were treated humanely. The Swedish garrison was released from Noteburg with four cannons, with banners flying. It consisted of 83 healthy and 156 wounded - the rest fell during the siege and assault. The soldiers walked with personal weapons, with bullets in their mouths as a sign that they had preserved their military honor.
Russian soldiers who died during the storming of the fortress were buried in a mass grave on the territory of the fortress. It was later revered as a sacred place of the Shlisselburg fortress.
In 1902, on the day of the 200th anniversary of the capture of Noteburg, a solemn memorial service took place at the mass grave. Even at that time, the Narodnaya Volya members were languishing in the fortress, and the gendarmes suggested that one of the prisoners, the former blacksmith P. A. Antonov, carve on a copper plaque the names of all those who fell and were buried in the fortress. He did the job. For a long time, a copper plaque with the names of fallen Russian soldiers was located in St. John's Cathedral, built in 1828. Ruins of the cathedral, destroyed during the Great Patriotic War Patriotic War, are located in the center of the fortress courtyard. The plaque is currently kept in the collections of the State Museum of the History of Leningrad.
After the capture of Noteburg, it was renamed Shlisselburg, which means “key city.” With its capture, the Russians opened access to the Neva. On the Sovereign Tower, Peter ordered the key to the fortress to be strengthened to commemorate the fact that the capture of the fortress would serve as the key to further victories in the Northern War and would open the way to the Baltic Sea, which was only 60 miles away.
In October 1702, major construction work began in the fortress. Peter I attached such great importance to the fortress conquered from the Swedes that he remained in it until December 1702 and personally supervised the construction of new fortifications - earthen bastions. The guns mounted on the bastions had a long range and could fire in crossfire. This made it possible to hit enemy troops when approaching the island. The bastions were built hastily: the fortress could be attacked by the Swedes at any moment.
Besides Peter I, the construction was observed by his closest associates - F.A. Golovin, G.I. Golovkin, N.M. Zotov, A.D. Menshikov, K.A. Naryshkin. Subsequently, some bastions, and later the corresponding towers, were named after them.
The construction of four bastions - Golovin, Zotov (Gosudarev), Naryshkin (Korolevsky), and Golovkin on a narrow strip of land between the bases of the towers and the water was associated with significant difficulties. Each of them was an irregular pentagon in plan, open towards the tower. Earthen fortifications were built from fascines (bundles of rods) covered with earth brought from the shore. To protect earthen embankments from erosion by the Neva flow, they were covered wooden log houses and cobblestone.
The parapet - the elevated part of the bastion - consisted of several rows of fascines covered with earth. The muzzles of the guns lay on it.
In 1715, the last, fifth, bastion was built in front of the Menshikov Tower.
The earthen fortifications required constant care: they were washed away by water almost every year. Over the years, repairing the bastions became increasingly difficult. On May 21, 1740, a project for rebuilding the bastions in stone, developed by engineer-captain Nikolai Ludwig, was approved.
The work was overseen by Chief General Abram Hannibal, the head of the Ladoga Canal and Kronstadt buildings, a prominent fortifier who created a line of fortifications in the north of the Vyborg province. The main work on the reconstruction of the bastions was carried out in 1755 - 1765. The Golovin, Gosudarev, Menshikov, Royal and Golovkin bastions were dressed in stone. At the same time, the sixth bastion, Flagny, was built. At the same time, curtain walls were erected - walls triangular in plan, connecting the bastions into a single fortification system. Stone bastions became significantly larger in area than earthen ones.
The outer (escarpment) retaining walls of the bastions and curtains are made of limestone. The platforms of the bastions - valgangi - remained earthen. On the valgangas there were 5-7 guns on wooden platforms. The parapet was also earthen with trimmed embrasures. Currently, the parapets on the bastions are hidden, and a road is laid around the fortress walls along the bastions and curtains. At one time, the Shlisselburg bastion fortress was a first-class fortification structure.
The restoration plan for the fortress involves the restoration of the bastions. It has already begun: in 1983, builders began restoration.
Throughout the 18th century, extensive construction took place on the territory of the fortress courtyard. A soldiers' barracks was built in 1715-1728, and a mint in 1716-1740. The mint was used as a workshop. The architect I. G. Ustinov began to build both buildings. After his departure to Moscow, the work was supervised by the capital's chief architect D. Trezzini. According to Ustinov's design, the construction of the wooden palace of A. D. Menshikov began in 1718. Three years later, in 1722, the architect Trezzini began building the wooden palace of Peter I, or the Sovereign's House.
The Bell Tower was reconstructed. At first, even under Ustinov, it received a two-tier completion, and in 1728-1730, according to Trezzini’s design, a 20-meter spire was installed on the tower.
In 1776-1779, on the site of a dismantled 16th-century church, the Church of St. John the Baptist was built according to the design of the architect A.F. Vista, and 49 years later, in the center of the fortress courtyard, St. John's Cathedral.
The two-story building, designed to accommodate a garrison of five thousand, had a height of more than 7 meters and was adjacent to the fortress wall, occupying the space from the Sovereign Tower to the citadel. On the courtyard side, the barracks had a two-tier vaulted gallery. A six-meter wide canal ran along the façade of the building. In 1882, the gallery was dismantled and the canal was filled in. From the middle of the 18th century, the barracks began to be used to imprison prisoners.
The construction of defensive structures in the Shlisselburg fortress ended in the 18th century. By this time it had lost its defensive significance. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, buildings related to the new purpose of the Shlisselburg fortress, which began to be used as a state prison, were erected in the fortress courtyard.

SHLISSELBURG FORTRESS - POLITICAL PRISON

At the beginning of the 18th century, the fortress was turned into a state prison. There were no prison buildings in the fortress at that time, so buildings for other purposes were used to imprison prisoners - a soldier’s or “numbered” barracks, various wooden buildings that have not survived to this day (Menshikov’s house, the house of Peter I, or the sovereign’s house).
In the first half of the 18th century, prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress were members royal family, pretenders to the throne, disgraced courtiers and nobles.
In 1718-1719, the sister of Peter I Maria Alekseevna was in the fortress, imprisoned here for participating in the conspiracy of Tsarevich Alexei against her father.
In 1725, after the death of Peter, on the orders of Catherine I, Evdokia Lopukhina, the first wife of the late emperor, was brought to the fortress from the Staraya Ladoga Dormition Monastery. Catherine saw in her a dangerous contender for the throne. In 1727, the grandson of Evdokia Lopukhina Peter II, having ascended the throne, freed her from the fortress. She spent the last four years of her life in the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow.
At the end of the 1730s, Anna Ioanovna imprisoned Prince Dolgoruky and Prince D. M. Golitsyn, members of the Supreme Privy Council, who were trying to limit the autocratic power of the Empress, in the fortress. The Supreme Privy Council was the highest state institution in Russia in 1726-1730. In the struggle for power that flared up in him, the advantage was initially on Menshikov’s side. Under Peter II, the noble nobility took over - princes Dolgoruky and Golitsyn. They sought to eliminate the results of the transformative activities of Peter I. Menshikov was exiled to Berezov. After the death of Peter II (January 19, 1730), the “rulers” made an attempt to limit autocracy in the interests of the aristocracy. They elevated Anna Ioannovna to the throne, who signed the “conditions” - conditions limiting her power. She pledged to govern the state in agreement with the Supreme Privy Council, without its knowledge not to declare war, not to make peace, not to subject nobles to criminal punishment, not to increase taxes, etc.
However, the policy of the Supreme Privy Council did not find the support of broad sections of the nobility. On February 25, 1730, Anna Ioannovna tore up the “conditions” and, with a manifesto dated March 4, 1730, abolished the Supreme Privy Council.
After the death of Anna Ioannovna, in 1740, her great-nephew, two-month-old baby Ivan Antonovich, son of Anna Leopoldovna and Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick, was declared emperor. The Duke of Courland, Biron, a favorite of the late empress, was appointed regent under the young emperor.
But on November 8, 1740, Princess Anna Leopoldovna ordered the arrest of Biron with his family and brother and sent them to the Shlisselburg fortress. They remained in custody for about six months while the investigation was carried out. In July 1741, the Senate sentenced Biron to death for “godless and evil” crimes, but Anna Leopoldovna replaced the execution with imprisonment in the Siberian town of Pelym.
When Peter I's daughter Elizabeth ascended the throne, she allowed Biron to live permanently in Yaroslavl, where he moved in March 1742.
In 1756, sixteen-year-old Ivan Antonovich, who was proclaimed emperor after the death of Anna Ioannovna, became a prisoner of the fortress. Since 1744, he was kept by order of Elizabeth Petrovna in Kholmo-Gory. From here he was taken out at night, with the strictest secrecy, and taken to the Shlisselburg fortress under the name of a “nameless convict.” Special instructions were developed regarding the maintenance of this prisoner. He was supervised by three officers. They were ordered to keep everything connected with the prisoner in the greatest secrecy. Apart from these three officers, no one was allowed to enter the barracks in which he was placed. In the entryway near the barracks there were always two sentries with loaded guns. While the room was being cleaned, the prisoner had to be behind screens so that no one could see him.
In 1764, the second lieutenant of the Smolensk infantry, V. Ya. Mirovich, who was on guard duty in the fortress, decided to release Ivan Antonovich, bring him to St. Petersburg, proclaim him emperor, hoping to receive titles, ranks, lands, and most importantly, money from the “grateful” emperor. But he failed to implement this plan. The guards carried out the secret order given to them on the orders of Catherine II: “If it happens, more than expected, that someone wants to take a prisoner away from you... then kill the prisoner, and do not hand him over alive to anyone.” Mirovich was arrested and handed over to the court and executed.
Since the end of the 18th century, the Shlisselburg Fortress has been a political prison in which fighters against autocracy and serfdom languished.
Increased political and economic oppression on the part of the tsarist administration and local feudal lords, the forced Christianization of the Muslim population led to unrest in Bashkiria. In the spring of 1755, an uprising broke out. The immediate reason for the action was the Senate decree of March 16, 1754, which prohibited the Bashkirs from freely extracting salt from local salt deposits. In addition to the Bashkirs, Tatars, Udmurts, Chuvashs, and Mishars (Meshcheryaks) took part in the uprising. They were also supported by the Muslim clergy.
Mullah Batyrsha Aleev demanded that the Bashkirs not carry out the decrees of the tsarist government, arousing justified hatred of the tsarist government. But the struggle of ordinary participants was directed not only against the oppression of the Russian autocracy, but also against the exploitation of local feudal lords.
The uprising was brutally suppressed by tsarist troops. Batyrsha was arrested and imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress. He spent 5 years in solitary confinement. In July 1762, while trying to reach the priest, Batyrsha was killed.
Among the first prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress were progressive figures of Russian culture - the writer Fyodor Vasilyevich Krechetov and the journalist-publisher Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov.
Krechetov was a member of the public service- At first he was a scribe, then a copyist at the College of Justice, a clerk at the headquarters of Field Marshal A. G. Razumovsky, and served in the Tobolsk Infantry Regiment. He retired with the rank of lieutenant. He was an educated man and took progressive positions on the most important issues of Russian social life. Krechetov dreamed of broad activities for the benefit of his homeland. He was indignant at the arbitrariness and lack of rights, and considered it necessary to free the peasants from serfdom and make it easier for the soldiers to serve. In 1785, Krechetov created a secret educational society and demanded restrictions on autocracy, equal rights for citizens, judicial reform, and the full dissemination of knowledge among the people. In 1786, he began publishing a magazine, which was banned by censorship after the release of the first issue.
In 1793, Krechetov was arrested following a denunciation. The manuscripts taken from him became grave evidence against him. On July 18, 1793, after the verdict was announced, Krechetov was imprisoned in the Petropalov Fortress, and a year and a half later he was transferred to Shlisselburg. The order to the commandant of the fortress, Kolyubakin, said: “A prisoner named Krechetov should be accepted and placed in the Shlisselburg fortress in one of the empty rooms there under the numbered rooms so that he does not have any conversations with anyone and is kept in the strictest possible conditions, 25 will be paid for his maintenance. kopecks per day."
The convict was placed on the second floor of the “numbered” barracks in cell No. 5. He remained in prison for six years. In 1801, on the occasion of the accession to the throne of Alexander I, Krechetov was released. He left the fortress sick, incapable of any work.
At the same time as Krechetov, Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov, a famous public figure and educator of the 18th century, was in the Shlisselburg fortress. Novikov was born in 1744 into a wealthy noble family. In 1769, he left military service, which promised him a brilliant career, and decided to devote himself to publishing. He began publishing the satirical magazine “Drone”, which had an anti-noble, anti-serfdom orientation. In his articles, Novikov showed that serfdom leads to the destruction of the state, to the ruin of the country, and that it is immoral and inhumane. However, rightly seeing in serfdom the source of Russia’s misfortunes, he was unable to rise to the awareness of the revolutionary idea, to the understanding that only the people in armed struggle can destroy the hated regime. As an educator, Novikov believed in the power of education, believing that the main and only path to the destruction of serfdom was education.
In 1779-1792, Novikov launched a broad educational activity: he concentrated three printing houses in his hands, published the newspaper "Moskovskie Vedomosti", the magazines "Morning Light", "Moscow Monthly Edition", "Addition to the Moskovskie Vedomosti", "Children's Reading" and others, edited and published hundreds of books in all branches of knowledge. Organized a wide book trade, opening bookstores in sixteen cities. Provided significant assistance to peasants who suffered from famine in 1787.
Catherine II followed Novikov's activities with dissatisfaction. By decree of April 22, 1792, she ordered a search of the publisher, who was then living on his estate near Moscow. During the search, they found books printed in a secret printing house, and in Novikov’s Moscow stores they found books whose sale was prohibited.
In the same year, by order of the Empress, the publisher was imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress for 15 years. Novikov, “his man” (i.e., servant) and Doctor Bagryansky were placed in cell 9 on the lower floor of the “numbered” barracks. No other prisoners were kept on the lower floor at that time, apparently in order to completely isolate the prisoner. Novikov was starving in the fortress. They were given one ruble a day for the maintenance of all three, but this was completely insufficient, since they had to spend money on buying medicine - Novikov was sick. For a long time he was prohibited from walking. The prisoner had a hard time with the ban on having books in his cell except the Bible, “he endured want and poverty in all kinds of linen and clothing.”
After the death of Catherine II, by order of Paul I on November 9, 1796, Novikov was released. He came out of there physically and mentally broken.
In 1762, by order of Peter III, construction of the first prison building, the Secret House, began in the fortress. The construction project was developed by the architect Peter Paton. As a result of a palace coup, Peter III was overthrown and killed in Ropsha. Construction work was suspended for several years. Only in 1798 the construction of the secret house was completed. This prison building went down in the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia under the name of the Old Prison of the Shlisselburg Fortress (as it became known after another prison building was built in the large fortress courtyard in 1884 - the New Prison, the prisoners of which were Narodnaya Volya members).
The old prison was located in a citadel, separated by high stone walls from a large fortress courtyard. Both ends of the building rested against the fortress walls, dividing the citadel courtyard into two unequal parts in the direction from west to east. This is how a large courtyard of the citadel (south of the prison) and a small courtyard (north of it) were formed.
The old prison had a simple layout: along the rectangular building there was a through corridor, on both sides of which there were ten solitary cells. Three chambers opened onto the large courtyard of the citadel, separated from each other by empty spaces (8, 9, 10). The remaining seven chambers overlooked the small courtyard of the citadel. Four cells (1, 4, 7, 9) had two windows, the rest had one. Cell 9 was intended for the duty officer. In addition to solitary cells, the building had a kitchen (next to the Svetlichnaya Tower) and a soldiers' guardhouse (at the end of the building - near the fortress wall facing Lake Ladoga). There were two entrances to the prison from the large courtyard of the citadel, and one from the small courtyard.
Frosted glass and iron bars were installed in the cell windows. Their walls were painted with ocher, the panels with dark gray paint. Each cell had a wooden bed and table, and a metal washbasin painted green.
The secret house became a place of imprisonment for the Decembrists, Russian and Polish revolutionaries of the 1830s-1860s, and Narodnaya Volya members. The museum exhibition, which opened in the restored prison building in 1983, tells about them.
The Decembrists discovered the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Armed uprisings on December 14, 1825 on Senate Square in St. Petersburg, and then in the Chernigov Regiment in Ukraine, marked the beginning of the first stage of the revolutionary liberation movement in our country. The place and role of the Decembrists in the revolutionary history of Russia was exhaustively defined by V. I. Lenin in his 1914 article “From the Past of the Workers’ Press in Russia”:
“The liberation movement in Russia went through three main stages, corresponding to the three main classes of Russian society that left their stamp on the movement: 1) the period of the nobility, from approximately 1825 to 1861; 2) the raznochinsky or bourgeois-democratic period, from approximately 1861 to 1895; 3) proletarian, from 1895 to the present. The most outstanding figures of the noble period were the Decembrists and Herzen."
Hatred of autocracy and serfdom, love for the oppressed people united the Decembrists and them to a patriotic feat, which became a high example for subsequent generations of Russian revolutionaries. The first revolutionary, armed uprising against the autocracy was defeated. Five leaders of the movement - Pestel, Ryleev, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Muravyov-Apostol, Kakhovsky - were executed on the crown of the Peter and Paul Fortress on the night of July 13, 1826, 121 Decembrists were exiled to Siberia for hard labor and eternal settlement. Some Decembrists in 1826-1834, before being sent to Siberia, were prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress.
Already on January 9, 1826, the commandant of the fortress received an order to submit to His Majesty’s own hands information on how many places there are for keeping prisoners, how many there are, who exactly is being held in the fortress and how many free places there are.
After the trial of the Decembrists, the fortress accepted 17 prisoners into its walls: three Bestuzhev brothers - Mikhail, Nikolai and Alexander, V.A. Divova Y.M. Andreevich, A.P. Yushnevsky, A.S. Pestova, I.I. Pushchina, I.I. Gorbachevsky, M.M. Spiridova, A.P. Baryatinsky, VK.Kuchelbecker, F.F. Vadkovsky, V.S. Norova, P.A. Mukhanova, A.V. Poggio and I.V. Poggio. While waiting to be sent to Siberia, they spent from several days to several years in the fortress.
For subsequent sending to Siberia, the Decembrists were taken to the Shlisselburg fortress from Kexholm, Sveaborg, Peter and Paul and other fortresses. They were brought here and sent from here to their destinations always shackled in leg shackles.
M.A. left memories of his stay in the Shlisselburg Fortress. Bestuzhev. He described the commandant of the fortress, Plutalov, as a thief and embezzler. Only after the death of this commandant, his successor Friedberg gave the prisoners everything that was due, namely: dressing gowns, linen, mattresses, bed linen; prisoners were given the opportunity to have tobacco and tea, and cells began to be repaired.
M. A. Bestuzhev spoke about his first day in the cell of the Secret House: “The weather was warm, the window was open. I went up to him and was numb with delight when I heard in barely audible taps the question (as I learned later) of Pushchin, who asked Pestov: "Find out who the new guest is in your neighborhood?" Without remembering myself, forgetting my usual caution, I rushed to the window, started knocking and thereby almost ruined things. They stopped me in time, and having learned all the laws of their air correspondence, I often talked even with my brother Nikolai, who was sitting in the last room, so that there were 6 rooms between us.”
The impression from the stay of the Decembrist I. I. Pushchin in the Shlisselurg fortress is known. He wrote about him in a letter to his family, relying on the gendarme who took him to Siberia, who promised to deliver the correspondence to its destination. But the gendarme, who hid the letter in his cap, accidentally dropped it on the way, and the letter ended up in the III department. In this letter, Pushchin wrote: “The commandant miraculously finished our casemates, but I thank God that I got out of them, albeit with chains...”
In another letter from Pushchin to his father, which the gendarme, who received it for secret transmission to the addressee,
presented to his superiors, there are also a few lines about his stay in the Shlisselburg fortress: “In Shlisselburg I became terrible friends with Nikolai Bezhev, who was sitting next to me, and we reached such perfection that we could speak through the wall with signs so quickly that it was not possible for our conversations better language was needed."
It is not known what motivated the tsar when he left some of the condemned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and sent others to other places of imprisonment.
Thus, Joseph Poggio, sentenced to 12 years of hard labor with the term reduced to 8 years, was sent after the verdict was announced to the Sveaborg fortress, from where in April 1828 he was transferred to Shlisselburg. Here he was kept for six and a half years in complete solitude. The conditions under which Poggio lived in Shlisselburg are known from the Notes of M. N. Volkonskaya: “For all these years, he saw only his jailer and occasionally the commandant. He was left in complete ignorance of everything that happened outside the walls of the prison, his were never allowed into the air, and when he asked the sentry: “What day is it?” they answered him: “I can’t know.” Thus, he had not heard of the Polish uprising, the July Revolution, the wars with Persia and Turkey, not even about cholera; his sentry died of it at the door, and he suspected nothing of the epidemic. The dampness in his prison was such that all his clothes were soaked with it, his tobacco became moldy, his health suffered so much that all his teeth fell out ".
The highest order to imprison Joseph Poggio in Shlisselburg followed the request of Senator Borozdin. Poggio was married to his daughter, who wanted to follow her husband to hard labor against the will of her father.
The place of Poggio's imprisonment was kept in the strictest confidence. Periodically, the III department sent a “notification” to the commandant of the fortress - “to deliver the attached letter and parcel to Osip Poggio, who is in the Shlisselburg fortress...” Only in January 1829, Poggio received permission to respond to letters, but it was still forbidden to indicate his place location. After six and a half years of staying in the Shlisselburg fortress, on July 10, 1834, by order of the Minister of War, Poggio was sent to Siberia.
A difficult fate befell V.K. Kuchelbecker. He spent almost ten years in prison in five royal fortresses. Arrested on January 25, 1826, he was taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress, from there he was transported to Shlisselburg, and from there to Dinaburg. From Dennaburg four years later he was transferred to the Revel citadel, and from there to the Sveaborg fortress, from there, finally, in 1835, he was sent to settle in Barguzin, in Eastern Siberia.
During one of these crossings, on the way from the Shlisselburg fortress to Dinaburg, on October 14, 1827, at the Zalazy post station, not far from Borovichi, Kuchelbecker was seen by Pushkin, returning from Mikhailovskoye to St. Petersburg. The next day, Pushkin wrote about this meeting: “One of the prisoners stood leaning against a column. A tall, pale and thin young man with a black beard, in a frieze overcoat, approached him... Seeing me, he looked at me with liveliness. I involuntarily turned to him. We look at each other intently - and I recognize Kuchelbecker. We rushed into each other's arms. The gendarmes pulled us apart. The courier took me by the hand with threats and curses - I did not hear him. Kuchelbecker felt sick. The gendarmes gave him nodes, put him in a cart and rode off."
The history of the Shlisselburg fortress does not know a prisoner longer than that of Valerian Lukasinsky, a major in the Polish army, the organizer of a patriotic Polish society to fight Russian tsarism. He spent almost 38 years in solitary confinement and fortress (1830-1868). Over the years, the commandants changed more than once, the guards in the fortress prisons changed, dozens of secret prisoners were in the cells, only Lukasinsky, a victim of tsarist tyranny, invariably remained in the same place.
At the end of 1821, Lukasinski was appointed to the court to sentence three officers of the Zamosc fortress, who were accused of neglecting prisoners. Initially, the court handed down a rather lenient sentence. But the governor of Warsaw, the brother of Tsar Alexander I, Constantine, demanded a more severe punishment in the form of ten years' imprisonment in shackles. All the judges gave in to this demand, only Lukasinsky opposed. After this, he was expelled from the active army, secret surveillance was established over him, which revealed his leading role in the patriotic society.
Lukasinski was arrested in Warsaw in 1822. He was then 36 years old. After two years of investigation and pre-trial detention, the sentence of a military court was carried out on him and other convicts. Their shoulder straps and orders were torn off, and their swords were broken over their heads as a sign of dishonor. Dressed in gray prison robes, with shaved heads and shackled in leg shackles, they had to march with wheelbarrows in front of the troops of the Warsaw garrison while the drums beat deafeningly. Directly from Lukasinski Square they took him to the Zamosc Fortress prison, where he spent seven years. In 1825, for attempting to organize a conspiracy in the fortress to free Lukasinski, he was sentenced to death, but the governor of Warsaw replaced the death penalty with fourteen years of hard labor. In 1830, the Chamber of Deputies of the Polish Sejm turned to Nicholas I with a request to pardon Łukasinski. In response to this request, Lukasinsky was transferred to Bobruisk, and then to Shlisselburg with the order: “... a state criminal of the Kingdom of Poland should be kept in the most secret way, so that no one even knows his name and where he was brought from.”
In one of his letters to M.A. Bakunin, who was also a prisoner of Shlisselburg, told how he met Lukasinsky in the large courtyard of the citadel near the Old Prison. “Once during a walk,” Bakunin wrote, “I was struck by the figure of an old man with a long beard, hunched over, but with a military bearing, which I had never seen before. A separate duty officer was assigned to him, who did not allow anyone to approach him. This old man approached slowly, weakly, "as if with an uneven gait and without looking back. Among the officers on duty there was one noble, sympathetic man. From him I learned that this prisoner was Major Lukasinsky."
Only six years before his death, the prison regime for Lukasinsky was relaxed. Commandant Lsparsky obtained permission to transfer Lukasinsky to the lower floor of the “numbered” barracks, emphasizing in his petition Lukasinsky’s 75-year-old age, his stay in the fortress for more than 31 years, weakness, and hearing loss.
On February 27, 1868, Lukasnsky died. His body was buried on the territory of the fortress. Thus ended almost half a century of imprisonment of the victim of violence and tyranny.
On March 18, 1847, in St. Petersburg, Nikolai Ivanovich Gulak, the founder and inspirer of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who had arrived from Kiev, was arrested in St. Petersburg, whose participants set themselves the goal of uniting all Slavic states, including Russia, into a republican federal union. The historian N.I. Kostomarov, poet T,G. Shevchenko and others. Gulak behaved courageously during interrogations and showed extraordinary fortitude. The court sentenced him to three years in prison in the Shlisselburg fortress.
From Shlisselburg he was sent into exile in Perm in 1850, where he remained until 1855. Later he worked as a gymnasium teacher in the south of Russia.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, a famous populist revolutionary, one of the theorists of populism, spent three years in captivity in the Shlisselburg fortress. A participant in the 1848 revolution in Germany and Austria, he was sentenced to death by the courts of two foreign states, and was imprisoned in several prisons of these states - in Dresden, in the Königstein fortress and others. In one of these prisons he was chained to the wall. In 1851, the Austrian government handed Bakunin over to the tsarist government, and, by order of Nicholas I, shackled in hand and leg shackles, he was brought to the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he remained for almost three years. On March 12, 1854, Bakunin was transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress with an order to the commandant to provide the prisoner with the best cell, but with strict orders: “Since Bakunin is one of the most important prisoners, then exercise all possible caution in relation to him, have the most vigilant and strict supervision over him, keep him completely separate, do not allow any strangers to approach him and remove news from him about everything that happens outside his premises so that his very presence in the castle is kept in the greatest secret."
Bakunin had a hard time enduring his imprisonment. The meager diet caused him to develop scurvy, as a result of which the prisoner lost all his teeth and could only eat cabbage soup from prison food. A few years later, Bakunin told Herzen about this time: “A terrible thing - life imprisonment. To drag out a life without a goal, without hope, without interest! With a terrible toothache that lasted for weeks... not sleeping for days or nights - whatever no matter what I read, even during sleep I feel... I am a slave, I am a dead man, I am a corpse... However, I did not lose heart... I only wanted one thing: not to reconcile, not to change, not to humiliate myself like that "to seek consolation in any kind of deception - to keep intact the holy feeling of rebellion until the end."
For a long time Bakunin did not want to turn to the tsar himself, hoping for his mother’s efforts to free him from the fortress. But his health was increasingly deteriorating, and his mother’s efforts remained unsuccessful. On February 14, 1857, Bakunin wrote a petition to Alexander II, full of feigned repentance, and promised to “devote the rest of his days to his sorrowful ... mother, to prepare in a dignified manner for death.” The tsar granted Bakunin’s request for release from the fortress: solitary confinement was replaced by exile to Siberia for a settlement. One of the last political prisoners in the Secret House in the period from 1826 to 1870 was Nikolai Andreevich Ishutin. He was in the fortress from October 1866 to February 1868.
A participant in the Karakozov conspiracy aimed at assassinating Alexander II, Ishutin was sentenced to death, commuted to hard labor. On his way to Siberia, Ishutin was returned for imprisonment in the Shlisselburg fortress. The prison administration was ordered to keep him in the Secret House "with the strictest observance of all the rules established for secret prisoners, and with the preservation of his name in complete secrecy."
In February 1868, Ishutin, shackled, was taken from the fortress to hard labor in Eastern Siberia. In October 1874, a medical commission declared him suffering from insanity. He died on January 5, 1879 in the Lower Cari hospital.
A participant in the Polish uprising of 1863, a member of the central national committee of the uprising, Bronislaw Schwarze spent seven years in the fortress (1863-1870). Subsequently, he wrote memoirs in which he spoke in detail about the fortress and the Secret House.
Schwarze accurately described those cells of the Secret House in which seven years of his imprisonment passed. He was first placed in cell 3. This number was written on a leather flap that covered the window in the door, which was painted dark green. The things inside the cell were the same color - a table, a stool and a wooden cot against the wall with a skinny mattress and a gray blanket. A bucket standing in the corner completed the furnishings. The table was placed near the window, covered with a lattice made of one-inch strips of iron. In the corner, near the door, stood a tall brick stove covered with white plaster. The oven door was in the corridor. The chamber size is three steps wide, six steps long. According to Schwarze, “the cramped and dark cell was inexpressibly gloomy and dead.”
In January 1866, Schwarze tried to arrange an escape. Using a single nail, found in the yard during a walk, he made a hole in the ceiling above the stove, worked at night, and during the day he sealed the hole with a sheet of white paper. “Ant-like” work, according to Schwarze, continued for many days, or rather nights. But one night the attic boards caught fire from a candle flame. Schwartz had to call security...
Like all prisoners of the Secret House, he noted the terrible dampness: “... it was enough for the linen to lie in the cell for several days, and it would become completely covered with mold.” Due to poor nutrition, Schwarze developed scurvy, and almost all of his teeth fell out.
In 1870, when the only prisoner of the Secret House was Schwarze, the question arose about closing the Shlisselburg State Prison. In August 1870, he was sent from the fortress to the fortification of Vernoye, Semirechensk region, and the Vyborg military correctional company, transformed in 1879 into the Shlisselburg disciplinary battalion, was transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress. The cells of the Secret House began to be used as punishment cells for guilty soldiers.
The revolutionary liberation movement in Russia in the 1870s and 1880s went down in history under the name populism. In the early 1870s, the populists, counting on a people's, peasant revolution, carried out propaganda work among the peasants. Their tactics were called “going to the people.” The populist revolutionaries tried to educate the people, distributed brochures in which the causes of social oppression were explained in a language accessible to the peasants, and the predatory nature of peasant reform. The pamphlets called for an uprising against the autocracy and landowners. The government, alarmed by the scale of the movement, brought the entire police apparatus to its feet. In 1873-1879, more than 2,500 people were arrested and brought to trial in cases of “social revolutionary propaganda” (“the trial of the 193”). "Walking among the people" had great importance for all further activities of the common populists. They got to know better the needs, thoughts and moods of the peasantry and at the same time, according to V.I. Lenin, in practice they were convinced “of the naivety of the idea of ​​​​the communist instincts of the peasant.” The revolutionaries came to the conclusion that it was necessary to unite the individual circles. Thus, in 1876, the secret society “Land and Freedom” arose.
In populist circles, the conviction grew that the autocracy was heading towards disaster, that under these conditions the possibilities of a revolutionary coup increased and therefore more active offensive actions by revolutionaries were necessary. Within “Land and Freedom,” a movement grew stronger that highlighted the struggle against the government, the conquest of political freedom, and the transfer of power to the people. In August 1879, "Land and Freedom" split into two independent organizations - "People's Will" and "Black Redistribution". The “Black Redistribution” chose as its activity propaganda among the people with the aim of preparing an all-Russian peasant revolt. "People's Will" set as its immediate goal to carry out a political revolution, destroy the modern state and transfer power to the people. The program of “Narodnaya Volya” also defined the role of the party: it was supposed to take upon itself the “initiation of the coup,” while at the same time the possibility of a popular revolution was not excluded. The conspiracy or popular revolution was supposed to be accelerated by the propaganda of the political ideals of the party and agitation for their implementation - the demand for the convening of the Constituent Assembly, reforms, the organization of meetings, demonstrations, etc.
As a defensive, agitational and revolutionary educational measure, the program did not exclude the use of terror against the enemies of the party and the people. In practice, terror became the main means of fighting the autocracy in the party's activities; it absorbed all its forces, distracting them from work among the masses. This was the weakness of the Narodnaya Volya theory. Narodnaya Volya, according to V.I. Lenin, “did not know how or could not inextricably link their movement with the class struggle within the developing capitalist society.”
"People's Will" had a leadership center - the Executive Committee, which included A.I. Zhelyabov, A.D. Mikhailov, N.A. Morozov, S.L. Perovskaya, V.N. Figner, A.A. Kvyatkovsky, M.F. Frolenko, M.F. Grachevsky and others. It was a small but carefully selected circle of people with revolutionary experience and diverse talents.
IN AND. Lenin highly appreciated the heroic struggle of the Narodnaya Volya, but believed that they did not and could not achieve their “immediate goal - the awakening of the people’s revolution. Only the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat succeeded in this.” Many Narodnaya Volya members were sentenced by the tsarist court to life imprisonment in the Shlisselburg fortress.
Frightened by the growth of the revolutionary movement in Russia, the tsarist government in 1881 decided to restore the former importance of the Shlisselburg fortress as one of the most important political prisons of the Russian Empire.
In the fortress yard, near the wall facing Lake Ladoga, in 1882-1883 a new prison building was built, which was called the New Prison, as opposed to the Old Prison - the former Secret House.
By 1884, there were two special prison buildings on the island. In the Old Prison, during the reconstruction, the layout and numbering of the cells were slightly changed, although their number remained the same - ten. The kitchen, soldiers' and officers' guardhouses have also been preserved. But the cells were turned into punishment cells. Those brought to the fortress for execution spent their last days and hours in the Old Prison before the sentence was carried out on them. Mentally ill and dying prisoners were also transferred here from the New Prison.
Both prison buildings are now museums. They introduce the revolutionary history of our country. Special exhibitions resurrect the glorious and tragic pages of the struggle of the best sons and daughters of Russia for freedom and social justice. The story about the life and revolutionary activities of a remarkable galaxy of Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries leaves a great impression on visitors.
In the building of the New Prison, tourists examine the cells, next to which hang portraits of former prisoners, and get acquainted with the exhibition located in the former reception room of the prison.
The prison had 40 solitary cells: 19 on the first floor, 21 on the second; on the ground floor there was also a reception room, which was both a bathroom for prisoners and quarters for the non-commissioned officer on duty. The cells are small in size - three and a half meters long and two and a half meters wide. In the first years, the asphalt floors in the cells and the walls up to the height of a man were painted dark gray, which made the cell, according to V.N. Figner, similar to a “dark box”.
M.V. Novorussky called his cell a “stone bag.” Indeed, the prisoner was surrounded by iron and stone. In the cell there was an iron folding bed, which the gendarmes raised to a vertical position in the morning, and in this form, under lock and key, it remained for the whole day. There was also an iron table and stool. On the bed there is a teak-covered basting mattress, two pillows, a flannelette blanket, on an iron table there is a metal bowl and plate, a wooden spoon, and a clay mug.
Compared to the Old Prison, the New Prison was improved: each cell had a water tap and a water closet. The rather large window let in very little light, since the glass was covered with gray paint. “The high location of the window in the cell,” recalled member of the military organization “Narodnaya Volya” M. Yu. Aschenbrenner, “thick iron bars, double frames took away a lot of light both in summer and winter, and frosted glass created eternal twilight in the cells. This lasted a long time, long enough to ruin the sight of everyone who managed to stay alive. Ten or twelve years later, when we began to have acute pain in our eyes, transparent glasses were inserted into us, and we finally saw the moon and the starry sky."
In the evening and at night, the cells and corridor were illuminated by portable copper kerosene lamps. The lamps in the cells burned all night. Since 1887, after the suicide of Grachevsky, who burned himself, they began to be locked - according to Aschenbrenner, “shackles were placed on the lamps.” In 1895, electric lighting was installed in the prison. The building was heated by a water heating system, the boiler room was located in the basement, but in the cells on the lower floor it was cold in winter and autumn: 8-12 degrees Celsius.
In the archive October revolution and socialist construction, documents on the acquisition of things for the New Prison have been preserved: along with mattresses, pillows, bowls, icons, bibles, prayer books and other spiritual literature, as well as ten straitjackets were purchased. Such a purchase as straitjackets was necessary: ​​during the existence of the prison, eight of its prisoners lost their minds.
In each cell, glued with bread crumbs, there was a printed text: “Instructions for prisoners in the Shlisselburg fortress.” For each violation of the prison regime, prisoners were threatened with imprisonment in a punishment cell (“with maintenance on bread and water, with the imposition of chains”), rods, deprivation of a mattress in a bed, deprivation of lunch, dinner or tea. The last paragraph of the instructions stated that “for insult by the actions of superiors” the death penalty is imposed. True, during the entire Narodnaya Volya period the rod was never used, but the paragraphs on the punishment cell and the death penalty did not remain only a threat.
The doors to solitary confinement cells in the New Prison opened for the first time on August 2, 1884. Mikhail Frolenko, Grigory Isaev, Nikolai Morozov, Mikhail Popov, Nikolai Shchedrin, Mikhail Grachevsky, Egor Minakov and others were delivered to Shlisselburg on barges from the Peter and Paul Fortress. In total, 36 people were brought to the fortress in August - October 1884.
Many prisoners spent many years in the cells of Shlisselburg. N.A. Morozov, M.R. Popov, M.F. Frolenko were prisoners of the fortress for 21 years, V.N. Figner, M.Yu. Ashenbrenner - for 20 years, M.V. Novorussky, T.A. Lopatin - 18 years old, L. A. Volkenshtein - 12 years old. In total, from 1884 to 1906, 68 people served imprisonment in the New and Old prisons, of which 15 were executed, 15 died of illness, 8 went crazy, 3 committed suicide.
To isolate prisoners during a walk in the large fortress courtyard, between the citadel wall and the fortress wall facing Lake Ladoga, not far from the place where the Mill Tower was (dismantled at the beginning of the 19th century), walking courtyards were built, which, due to their small size prisoners called them "cages" or "stalls". Six single courtyards were triangles in plan, separated from one another by high wooden walls. The length of each courtyard is 15 steps, the maximum width is 3 steps. An observation tower for a sentry rose above them.
The prisoner's day slowly dragged on in solitary confinement, without books, without physical labor, in the deathly silence of the prison. This monotony was interrupted only by walking and distributing food.
The same food was given to both the healthy and the sick. For example, Butsinsky, who was dying of stomach cancer, ate the same porridge, the same mushroom soup with worms, the same raw, unbaked bread as all the other prisoners. But the food was not only meager and of poor quality, it was also deadly monotonous. “It was worth remembering what dish was at dinner to determine what day of the week it was,” wrote L.F. Yanovich. The monotonous food repeated day after day, month after month inspired disgust and forced one to voluntarily give it up.
Even more difficult than material deprivation, the prisoners of the fortress endured the moral conditions of imprisonment. Solitary confinement, the main point of the prison regime, created a painful environment and suppressed the will of the prisoner. N.A. Morozov wrote: “The most important torture is loneliness under eternal hostile surveillance and eternal silence.”
The prison not only fenced off the prisoner from outside life. The prison administration suppressed any attempt by prisoners to communicate with each other - even through knocking. But the need for communication was so great and ineradicable that the tapping did not stop even under the threat of punishment. “The struggle for the knock is the first struggle,” wrote V.N. Figner, “that the prisoner wages: it is directly a struggle for existence.”
The prison regime in the New Prison steadily led prisoners to death; they died from madness, exhaustion, and consumption. In the first years, Butsevich, Zlatopolsky, Bogdanovich, Malavsky, Kobylyansky, Isaev and others died, and Klimenko and Grachevsky committed suicide. These were very young people - aged 27-35 years.
The prisoners took the death of their comrades seriously. V.N. Figner in her memoirs talked about the impression that the death of G.P. Isaev, imprisoned in cell 3, next to which his portrait is now placed, made on everyone. “Isaev’s dying sufferings were terrible,” wrote Figner. “It was, it seems, the most severe agony of all that had to be endured. There was dead silence in the prison... we all hid, as if we had shrunk, and listened with bated breath to the complete there was a lull... there was not a sound... and in the midst of a tense state, a prolonged groan was suddenly heard, more like a scream... It is hard to witness a person’s parting with life, but it’s even harder and more terrible to be a passive listener of such parting, walled up in a stone bag ".
G.P. Isaev was one of the leaders of Narodnaya Volya. If Figner called N.I. Kibalchich a thought, then G.P. Isaev was called the hands of the Executive Committee in its terrorist activities. A student at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University, and then at the Medical-Surgical Academy, Isaev joined the Narodnaya Volya party in 1879. He worked in a dynamite workshop and participated in most of the assassination attempts on Alexander II. Arrested the day after the assassination attempt on March 1, 1881, he was put on trial and sentenced to death, commuted to indefinite hard labor. On August 2, 1884, together with other Narodnaya Volya members, he was transferred from the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress to the Shlisselburg Fortress. Here he died of tuberculosis on March 23, 1886, in cell 3, on the first floor.
One of the first to die in Shlisselburg and the first suicide was M.F. Klimenko. Convicted at the "trial of 17" in March 1883, he was sentenced to death, but his execution was commuted to eternal imprisonment. In August 1884, he was transferred from the Trubetskoy bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress to the Shlisselburg Fortress. Unable to bear the harsh prison regime and solitary confinement, Klimenko committed suicide on October 5, 1884 in cell 26, on the second floor.
The report about this from the head of the Shlisselburg gendarme department, Colonel Pokroshinsky, said: “On this day at 7 o’clock in the morning, the exiled convict state criminal Mikhail Klimenko, held in the Shlisselburg prison, in cell 26, took his own life by hanging himself on a fan placed on the left side at the entrance to the cell, above the water closet, and instead of a rope he used the lining from the sash of his robe, and although he was immediately provided with medical assistance, it was unsuccessful, since the prisoner was already dead... Klimenko’s corpse on the same date at 7 o’clock evening he was buried in a specially designated place by the police near a cemetery near the city of Shlisselburg."
The prison authorities were reprimanded for the oversight and quickly responded to it: the ventilator doors were removed and the corners of all cells to the right and left of the entrance were blocked with bricks. These corners were the only place where the prisoner could remain out of sight of the gendarmes, who looked into the cell through a “peephole.”
Near cell 1 there is a portrait of E.I. Minakov, who was in it from August 2 to September 21
1884.
Egor Ivanovich Minakov began revolutionary activities while a student at Odessa University. He attended meetings of the revolutionary circle, was one of the organizers of the failed demonstration in honor of N.G. Chernyshevsky, and conducted propaganda among the workers. He was arrested in 1879 and sentenced to hard labor for 20 years. Minakov managed to escape from the stage while traveling from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk, but he was detained and sentenced to indefinite hard labor for escape. In 1883, he was transferred from the Carian penal servitude to St. Petersburg, to the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Minakov was one of those 22 Narodnaya Volya members who were brought to the Shlisselburg fortress on August 2 and 4, 1884. After 10-12 days, he was one of the first to protest against the harsh prison regime.
Minakov demanded from the administration books of non-spiritual content and permission to smoke tobacco. Since this was denied to him, he began a hunger strike. On the seventh day of the hunger strike, when prison doctor Zarkevich entered the cell, Minakov hit him, for which he was put on trial. At the trial, he stated that he hit the doctor in order to achieve the death penalty. On September 7, 1884, he was sentenced to death. Minakov was offered to sign a petition for pardon, but he refused. He was shot in the great courtyard of the citadel on September 21, 1884. This was the first execution in the Shlisselburg fortress. Following her, until 1906, 14 more executions were carried out.
Minakov's death did not pass without a trace. The first person to respond to the death of his comrade was I.N. Myshkin, imprisoned in cell 18, opposite Minakov’s cell. I.N. Myshkin, the son of a soldier and a peasant woman, was born in 1848. He served as a government stenographer and kept minutes of zemstvo meetings in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. In 1874, he created an illegal printing house in Moscow to supply propaganda literature to participants in the “going to the people.”
After the failure of the printing house, Myshkin fled abroad, to Geneva, but in 1875 he returned to Russia to carry out his bold plan - to free N.G. Chernyshevsky from the Vilyui prison. Disguised as a gendarme officer and with forged documents, he came to the Vilyui police officer with a demand to hand over Chernyshevsky for further departure. Myshkin was arrested and brought to the “trial of 193”. The court sentenced him to ten years of hard labor. Myshkin was sent to Belgorod prison.
But his ebullient, active nature could not come to terms with imprisonment. He began to look for a way to escape. Having lifted the floorboard in his cell, he began to dig under the wall at night, carrying the earth in a “bucket” while walking into the prison yard. But one day, forgetting about caution, he went down into the tunnel during the day. The duty officer walking along the corridor looked into the “peephole” of his cell at the moment when Myshkin, lifting the floorboard, came out of the tunnel. Myshkin was transferred to another cell. The hope of freedom has disappeared.
Unable to bear the bullying of the jailers, Myshkin decided to hit the prison warden and thereby achieve the death penalty. After this, Myshkin was brutally beaten. Bloodied, unconscious, in leg and hand shackles, he was transferred to a punishment cell. Myshkin's hopes that he would be shot did not come true. He was declared crazy, and from the punishment cell, shackled hand and foot, he was transferred first to Novo-Borisoglebskaya, then to Kharkovskaya, and later to Mtsensk prison. In 1880, Myshkin, along with other thirty prisoners of the Mtsensk prison, was sent to the Kara River.
In the spring of 1882, prisoners on the Kara organized an escape - 12 convicts were released from the prison workshops. Myshkin ran in the first pair, with the worker Khrushchov. After long wanderings through the taiga, they reached Vladivostok. At that time, news of the escape from Kara spread throughout the entire region, and signs of the escaped convicts were reported to all gendarmerie stations. Myshkin and Khrushchev were identified, arrested and returned to Kara. In 1883, Myshkin was transported from Kara to the Peter and Paul Fortress, and in 1884 - to Shlisselburg.
A little over four months after Myshkin’s imprisonment in the Shlisselburg fortress, he came up with the idea of ​​inflicting “an insult to the commanding officer,” for which he would be sentenced to death. Fulfilling his intention, he threw a copper plate in the face of the prison guard Sokolov, whom the prisoners called “Herod” for his cruelty. This happened on December 25, 1884, at 7 pm. Right there in the cell, Myshkin was tied up and severely beaten by the gendarmes, and they put him in a straitjacket. During interrogation on December 30, 1884, Myshkin spoke about the reasons for his action: he wanted the death penalty for himself in order to achieve a softening of the prison regime for other prisoners; he felt guilty that the situation of his comrades on Kara had worsened after his escape. Myshkin was executed on January 26 at 8 a.m. in the large courtyard of the citadel. He spent the last days of his life, from January 15 to 26, in solitary confinement in the Old Prison. In this cell, on the lid of the table, he wrote the inscription: “January 26, I, Myshkin, have been executed.”
For those prisoners who did not have the opportunity to engage in any kind of work, the inevitable consequence of the prison regime was, according to N.A. Morozov, mental disorder. This fate befell Shchedrin, Konashevich, Pokhitonov and others.
The mentally ill were in the Shlisselburg prison together with the healthy. This was one of the most terrible features of this prison.
“Consumption and scurvy stopped mowing down, but death took on a more terrible form - the form of insanity. The insane lived with us,” M.Yu. Aschenbrenner wrote about this in his memoirs, “turning our abode into hell. Looking at the crazy, the healthy saw their terrible fate and appreciated a completely indefinite stay in prison instead of the death penalty."
Near camera 12 there is a portrait of N.P. Shchedrin. Nikolai Pavlovich Shchedrin was sentenced to death twice. The sentence in May 1881 in the case of the South Russian Workers' Union was commuted to eternal hard labor. Shchedrin was exiled to Kara. But along the way, in the Irkutsk prison, Shchedrin learned about how the local jailer Soloviev abused female political prisoners. Shchedrin decided to take revenge for insulting women. Having seized a suitable opportunity during a prisoner inspection, in the presence of all the prisoners and prison guards, he struck Solovyov in the face. A new one was excited trial. Shchedrin was again sentenced to death. But this time, too, the death penalty was replaced by eternal hard labor and chaining to a wheelbarrow, from which he was transferred to the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
It is not surprising that these difficult trials broke Shchedrin. While still in Ravelin (in 1881-1882), he showed the first signs of mental illness, but only in 1896 was he taken from the Shlisselburg fortress to the Kazan psychiatric hospital.
Mentally ill prisoners were transferred to the Old Prison so that “order and silence” would not be disturbed in the New Prison. The nightmarish conditions in which Shchedrin lived in the Old Prison are known from the suicide notes of Narodnaya Volya S.M. Ginzburg: “To pass the time, the gendarmes stop at the door of a crazy prisoner and begin to mock him in every possible way, reaching the point of incredible animal vileness. I two stopped the gendarmes several times, but such an appeal to their moral sense was not enough and only the threat of complaining to the authorities forced them to abandon this wild entertainment."
Sofya Mikhailovna Ginzburg studied at the Nadezhda obstetric courses in St. Petersburg and took part in the work of military revolutionary circles. In 1885 she went abroad to study medicine. She lived first in Bern, then in Paris, where she met P.L. Lavrov. In 1888, she returned to Russia with the goal of uniting all the disparate revolutionary forces that were ideologically aligned with the broken Narodnaya Volya and restoring the activities of the party.
With the special presence of the Senate, she was sentenced to death for revolutionary activities, which was replaced by lifelong hard labor.
S.M. Ginzburg was taken to Shlisselburg on December 4, 1890 and placed in the Old Prison, in cell 4, in order to “isolate him from knocking and any contact with other prisoners.” The severity of solitary confinement was aggravated for the prisoner by the fact that she witnessed how the gendarmes in front of each other were sophisticated in their abuse of the sick Shchedrin. Ginzburg was allowed to sew prison underwear, for which she was given needles, threads and blunt-ended scissors with rounded ends. Using these scissors, she committed suicide on January 7, 1891, by cutting the carotid artery and veins in her neck.
Near camera 11 there is a portrait of M.F. Grachevsky. Mikhail Fedorovich Grachevsky is one of the most active members of the People's Will party. When he was eighteen years old, he left the seminary and became a public teacher. Suspected of political unreliability, he was forced to leave school and worked as a mechanic in railway workshops, and then as a machinist. In 1874, after a short imprisonment for distributing revolutionary proclamations, he moved to St. Petersburg and entered the Technological Institute. At the same time, he joined the factory as a mechanic to conduct propaganda among the workers. For the same purpose, he later moved to Moscow.
In 1875, Grachevsky was arrested and was in pre-trial detention for three years. In the “trial of 193”, due to lack of evidence, he was sentenced to three months in prison, with preliminary credit given. Grachevsky returned to St. Petersburg, but was soon expelled from the capital. In 1878, he was arrested again in Odessa and deported to Kholmogory, Arkhangelsk province. Active and energetic, he did not want to vegetate in exile and fled, but he was caught by gendarmes and returned to Kholmogory, from where he was transferred to Arkhangelsk. On the way to Arkhangelsk, he fled again and at the end of 1879 he appeared in St. Petersburg. Having restored his revolutionary connections, he joined the Narodnaya Volya party and was elected a member of the Executive Committee. In 1881-1882, Grachevsky was, according to V.N. Figner, “the party’s minister of finance and was in charge of all its financial affairs.” In addition, he, together with Kibalchich and Isaev, worked in a dynamite workshop and printed illegal publications of Narodnaya Volya in an underground printing house. In July 1882, Grachevsky and his comrades were arrested.
Imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress, Grachevsky waged a stubborn struggle with the prison administration. Protesting against the abuse of prisoners, he refused walks and food. In October 1886, he went on hunger strike for about three weeks, for which he was transferred to the Old Prison. Grachevsky decided to hit the prison doctor Zarkevich, get himself tried and talk about the torment of the prisoners. He fulfilled his intention, but was not brought to trial because he was declared mentally ill. On October 26, 1887, in cell 9 of the Old Prison, Grachevsky committed suicide: he doused his foot wraps with kerosene and, undressing, put one of them on his back, the other on his chest. He lit them from a kerosene lamp while lying on his bed...
At cell 15 there is a portrait of Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov. This is a man of amazing destiny. One of the most active Narodnaya Volya members, he lived until the Great October Socialist Revolution. In Soviet times, he became a prominent scientist, an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1932).
A member of the Land and Freedom party since 1878, he was one of the editors of the Land and Freedom newspaper. After the split of Land and Freedom, he became a member of the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, prepared an assassination attempt on Alexander II, and edited the party organ, the newspaper Narodnaya Volya. In February 1880, after the destruction of the printing house where the newspaper was printed, Morozov fled abroad. He lived in Switzerland, came to Paris and London, where he met Marx, and attended lectures at the University of Geneva. Upon his return to Russia in 1881, he was arrested and put on trial at the same time as Frolenko, A. Mikhailov, Sukhanov and other Narodnaya Volya members. Morozov was sentenced to hard labor without time and, together with other prominent party members, was first imprisoned in the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and in 1884 transferred to Shlisselburg.
Weak and sickly, Morozov survived and endured 21 years of harsh imprisonment, while others, stronger and healthier, died in prison from consumption and mental disorder. This became possible because he had scientific and literary interests that supported him and helped him survive the horror of imprisonment. V. N. Figner wrote that “in the silence of the ravelin, the thinker woke up in him.” In Shlisselburg, when prisoners began to be given books and writing materials, Morozov devoted himself entirely to scientific studies. Day after day, he thought about and wrote down his scientific hypotheses, made many calculations , compiled tables and diagrams. He wrote several in prison scientific works in physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, and was especially involved in natural science. After leaving the fortress, Morozov published his works, created in captivity, “Periodic systems of the structure of matter”, “D.I. Mendeleev and the significance of his periodic system for the chemistry of the future”, taught chemistry and astronomy at the Higher Courses of Lesgaft and at the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg.
In 1911, for the anti-religious tendencies of the book of poems “Star Songs,” Morozov was imprisoned for one year in Dvina prison.
Morozov wrote about this book: “Not all of these songs talk about the stars. No! Many of them were written in the darkness of an impenetrable night, when not a single star looked through the hanging black clouds. But in them there was always a desire for the stars, for that incomprehensible "the ideal of beauty and perfection that shines for us at night from the depths of the Universe. That's why I gave them this name."
A village on the right bank of the Neva, opposite the Shlisselburg fortress, is named in honor of N.A. Morozov.
Next to N.A. Morozov, M.Yu. Aschenbrenner was imprisoned in cell 16. Mikhail Yulievich Aschenbrenner (1842-1926) is one of the largest figures in the military-revolutionary organization of the People's Will party.
The son of a military engineer, he was raised in the Moscow Cadet Corps. Upon completion of the corps, Aschenbrenner was promoted to officer and left in service in Moscow.
For his refusal to participate in the suppression of the Polish uprising in 1863, Aschenbrenner, as politically unreliable, was transferred to provincial service. He served in Akkerman, Ekaterinoslav, Mirgorod and Tashkent. Aschenbrenner served in Turkestan for four years, distinguished himself in battles and was awarded several orders for “excellent courage and bravery.”
In 1870 he was transferred to the Odessa Military District. Here he met M.F. Frolenko and A.I. Zhelyabov. In Nikolaev he organized officers’ self-education circles and led them, receiving illegal literature through Frolenko.
At the end of 1881 - beginning of 1882, the Executive Committee of the People's Will, together with officers N.E. Sukhanov, N.M. Rogachev and A.P. Shtromberg, who entered the military center, developed a program of military organization. The main tasks of the military organization were defined as follows: “A military organization arises with the aim of, firstly, uniting and regulating the activities of revolutionary forces in the army; secondly, attracting the largest number of active figures and allies and, thirdly, establishing correct communication with the social revolutionary party of all Russia for mutual assistance and support."
The connection between military circles and Narodnaya Volya was carried out through the military center. The program was the theoretical and practical platform on which officer circles from different garrisons and naval bases began to unite.
V.N. Figner introduced Aschenbrenner to the program and charter of the military organization "People's Will", and he joined the party. Aschenbrenner organized a southern regional military center in Kyiv and toured provincial military revolutionary circles with the goal of uniting their activities. Betrayed by Degaev, Aschenbrenner was arrested in Smolensk in March 1883.
Aschenbrenner spent 20 years in the Shlieseelburg fortress. He was released in 1904. He lived with his relatives in Smolensk under police supervision, and was engaged in translations.
After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Aschenbrenner lived in Moscow, giving lectures and reports on the history of the revolutionary movement. The Council of People's Commissars assigned him a personal pension, and by order of the Revolutionary Military Council in December 1923, in commemoration of the revolutionary merits of the military organization of the People's Will party, Aschenbrenner's name was assigned to the Second Moscow Infantry School.
At camera 10 there is a portrait of G.A. Lopatin. The revolutionary spent 18 years in captivity here.
German Aleksandrovich Lopatin was born on January 13, 1845 in Nizhny Novgorod into a noble family. In 1866 he graduated from St. Petersburg University, brilliantly defending his dissertation for the title of Candidate of Natural Sciences. He was offered to stay at the university, but Lopatin abandoned the scientific career that was opening up to him and devoted all his energy to revolutionary activities.
In 1867, he went to Italy to join Garibaldi's detachment, but Garibaldi was captured and Lopatin had to return to Russia.
A few years later in Paris, Lopatin became a member of the First International. At the same time, he began translating “Capital” by K. Marx, and therefore in the summer of 1870 he went to England to have constant consultations with the author. Karl Marx highly appreciated the outstanding abilities of Lopatin, who became his close friend. In September 1870, Lopatin joined the General Council of the International and, together with Marx, fought against Bakunism. Lopatin interrupted his work on Capital due to the fact that he conceived and tried to implement the release of N.G. Chernyshevsky from Siberian exile. Unfortunately, Lopatin failed to implement his plan.
It was only in 1873 that Lopatin came to London and met Marx again. Under the influence of Marx and Engels, his materialist worldview strengthened. Lopatin understood that Russia of his time was facing a bourgeois-democratic revolution. In 1884, he made an attempt to recreate the "People's Will" destroyed by tsarism, to transform it into a broad people's organization that could carry out democratic changes in the country. But in October of the same year, in the midst of his vigorous activity, Lopatin was arrested on the Kazansky Bridge in St. Petersburg. He had with him illegal publications, proclamations, lists of persons with addresses in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, Rostov and other cities, so Lopatin’s arrest was followed by numerous other arrests.
For three years, the investigation into the case of G.A. Lopatin, who was at that time in the Peter and Paul Fortress, was conducted. In the summer of 1887, the court sentenced him to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment, which he served in the Shlisselburg fortress until 1905.
As a result of the heroic selfless struggle of the prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress and the growth of the revolutionary movement in the country in the 1890s, the regime in the fortress was somewhat relaxed. Prisoners were allowed to engage in physical labor in the gardens and in workshops equipped in the cells of the Old Prison - there were carpentry, turning, shoemaking, bookbinding and a forge. But the biggest gain was the right to read books of non-religious content. Having received writing materials and books on various branches of knowledge, the Narodnaya Volya members began to engage in scientific work.
The revolution of 1905 liberated the Narodnaya Volya from the Shlisselburg fortress.
The Shlisselburg fortress was not only a prison for several generations of Russian revolutionaries, but for more than two decades (from 1884 to 1906) it was also a place where the death penalty was carried out. The fortress became a place of execution with the opening of the New Prison. Before this, executions took place in St. Petersburg itself - on the Semenovsky parade ground, on the Smolensk field, in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
The first to be executed in Shlisselburg were prisoners of the New Prison E.I. Minakov, I.N. Myshkin and members of the military organization "People's Will" officers A.P. Shtromberg and N.M. Rogachev, who were brought to the fortress to carry out the death sentence on them.
Alexander Pavlovich Shtromberg, the son of a landowner in the Kursk province, was born in 1854. In 1874 he graduated from the naval school and was promoted to midshipman.
Stromberg and Rogachev actively participated in the discussion and development of the charter of the military organization, engaged in propaganda among officers, and attracted new members to the organization. In 1881, Stromberg was arrested and exiled to Eastern Siberia under police supervision. After Degaev’s betrayal, the military organization of “Narodnaya Volya” was destroyed, Stromberg was brought to St. Petersburg and brought to trial together with Rogachev in the case of the military organization (“trial of 14”). The St. Petersburg Military District Court sentenced them to death.
Nikolai Mikhailovich Rogachev was born in 1856 into a noble family. In 1876, after graduating from the First Pavlovsk Military School, he was promoted to ensign of artillery. In 1880 he joined the Narodnaya Volya. Rogachev conducted propaganda among officers in Helsingfors and St. Petersburg; in 1882, in order to attract new forces to the organization, he undertook a long trip around the North-Western Territory. Shortly before his arrest, he intended to create combat squads for a more successful terrorist fight. He was arrested in April 1883.
Stromberg and Rogachev were hanged on October 10, 1884 in the large courtyard of the citadel, near the fortress wall facing Lake Ladoga.
At the end of 1886, students of St. Petersburg University, V.I. Lenin’s elder brother A.I. Ulyanov and his comrades P.Ya. Shevyrev, V.D. Generalov, P.I. Andreyushkin, V.S. Osipanov, O.M. Govorukhin and others created a terrorist group.
All participants in this revolutionary group considered individual terror the most appropriate form of struggle against the tsarist autocracy. In this they were the successors of the People's Will party. But their revolutionary worldview was strongly influenced by Marxist literature, which at that time was widely distributed in the country thanks to the activities of the Liberation of Labor group.
A.I. Ulyanov and his comrades understood that the development of capitalism in Russia is inevitable, that the revolutionary movement must take on a proletarian character. This further increased the interest of young revolutionaries in Marxist teaching, in which they were attracted by the scientifically based theory of class struggle. But the populist ideology still remained the main one for them, although A.I. Ulyanov made an attempt to unite the ideas of the People's Will party and the Social Democrats in the program he compiled for the Terrorist faction of the People's Will party - that is how this group of revolutionary youth called itself.
The program asserted the inevitability of the onset of socialism in Russia as a result economic development, but at the same time the idea was allowed that Russia could move to socialism, bypassing capitalism. This reflected the populist views of the author of the program. The program assigned more to the working class in the revolutionary movement important role than the peasantry. This was a step forward compared to the Narodnaya Volya program, which considered the peasantry to be the main revolutionary force. But the author of the program, just like the populists, idealized the peasant community, considering it the embryo of socialism. The program compiled by A.I. Ulyanov, following Narodnaya Volya, recognized terror as the main content of the political struggle against the autocracy.
The terrorist group of A.I. Ulyanov was preparing an assassination attempt on Alexander III. Shevyrev watched the tsar’s trips, Ulyanov and Lukashevich were preparing bombs. On February 25, 1887, preparations were completed, but the assassination attempt on March 1 did not take place.
On Nevsky Prospekt on this day the metal throwers Osipanov, Generalov and Andreyushkin were arrested, and later Ulyanov and Shevyrev.
Group members Kancher, Gorkun and Volokhov gave detailed testimony during the investigation, revealing the role of all participants in the assassination attempt.
On April 15, 1887, 15 defendants in the “second March 1st” case appeared in court. All the accused, with the exception of Kancher, Gorkun and Volokhov, stood courageously and steadfastly in court.
Alexander Ulyanov refused to defend himself and made his own defense speech. There was no remorse in her, no request for mercy; he spoke about the reasons that led him to the path of struggle against the tsarist autocracy, about the determination of the revolutionaries to continue the fight, despite the persecution of the government. “Among the Russian people,” he said at the end of his speech, “there will always be a dozen people who feel so passionately the misfortune of their homeland that it is not a sacrifice for them to die for their cause. Such people cannot be intimidated by anything.”
The court's verdict was announced on April 19, 1887. All defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. For ten convicts, after submitting petitions for clemency, the death penalty was replaced by hard labor and settlement in Siberia, and two of them, M.V. Novorussky and I.D. Lukashevich, were sentenced to indefinite imprisonment in the Shlisselburg fortress.
On the night of May 4-5, a small steamer departed from the Commandant's pier of the Peter and Paul Fortress, on it were A.I. Ulyanov, P.Ya. Shevyrev, V.S. Osipanov, V.D. Generalov and P.I., shackled. Andreyushkin. Six hours later they became prisoners in solitary confinement in the Old Prison, where they spent two and a half days. At dawn on May 8, the execution took place in the large courtyard of the citadel. The first to be taken out of prison were Osipanov, Generalov and Andreyushkin. After hearing the verdict, they said goodbye to each other and ascended the scaffold. After their bodies were removed, Ulyanov and Shevyrev were brought to the place of execution.
In the morning, when M.V. Novorussky was taken for a walk in the courtyard of the citadel, he no longer saw any traces of what had happened here...
Fifteen years after this execution, in 1902, a prisoner of the fortress, member of the Narodnaya Volya M.F. Frolenko, planted an apple tree near the Old Prison, not knowing that the tree he planted marked the place of death of the heroes.
During the Great Patriotic War, when the fortress came under enemy fire, the apple tree was destroyed by a shell fragment. But on September 30, 1961, a young apple tree was planted in the same place by the former prisoner of the fortress, the old Bolshevik V.Ya. Ilmas, participants in the defense of the fortress during the war, V.A. Marulin, E.A. Ustinenkov and schoolchildren of the village named after N.A. Morozov.
In the year when the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries were preparing an assassination attempt on Alexander II, Stepan Valerianovich Balmashev was born in the city of Pinega, Arkhangelsk province, into the family of a political exile. Since 1900, Balmashev studied at Kiev University. In January 1901, for his active participation in the student movement, he, along with other 183 Kyiv students, was drafted into the army. In the fall of the same year, discharged from the army, he came to St. Petersburg and joined the militant organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). On the instructions of the party, in protest against the policy of repression against progressive students, on April 2, 1902, Balmashev killed the Minister of Internal Affairs D.S. Sipyagin in the Mariinsky Palace.
The St. Petersburg Military District Court sentenced Balmashev to death. On May 2, he was brought to the Shlisselburg fortress and at dawn on May 3, 1902, he was hanged in the small courtyard of the citadel, between the fortress wall and the Old Prison. This is where he is buried.
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, the largest petty-bourgeois party in Russia, took shape at the end of 1901 - beginning of 1902 as a result of the unification of a number of populist circles and groups. Denying the leading role of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries considered the driving forces of the revolution to be the democratic intelligentsia, the peasantry and the proletariat, assigning the main role in the revolution to the peasantry. The party program contained demands for the establishment of a democratic republic, regional autonomy, political freedoms, universal suffrage, the convening of a Constituent Assembly, and the establishment of an eight-hour working day. The basis of the agrarian program of the Social Revolutionaries was the demand for the socialization of the land - the elimination of landlordism and the transfer of land to the peasants. The agrarian program of the Socialist Revolutionaries attracted large masses of the peasantry to them in the revolution of 1905-1907. However, at the same time, the Social Revolutionaries considered it possible to maintain private ownership of other means of production. This determined the petty-bourgeois nature of the Socialist Revolutionary agrarian program, which was justly criticized by the Bolsheviks.
One of the main methods of struggle of the Socialist Revolutionaries was the deeply erroneous tactics of individual terror, which was carried out by a secret military organization. In the first years of the party’s existence, among its members there were many people devoted to the people and the idea of ​​revolution, S.V. Balmashev, I.P. Kalyaev, E.S. Sazonov and others.
Later the party took positions hostile to the people. After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Socialist Revolutionaries launched anti-Soviet agitation in the press and underground anti-Soviet activities. In the years civil war they waged an armed struggle against Soviet power, participated in organizing assassinations, conspiracies, and rebellions.
Of the members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, except for S.V. Balmashev, I.P. Kalyaev was executed in the fortress. Ivan Platonovich Kalyaev was born in 1877 in Warsaw. In 1897 he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, and the following year he transferred to St. Petersburg University, to the Faculty of Law.
On February 4, 1905, on behalf of the combat group of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, I.P. Kalyaev threw a bomb at the carriage of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the first adviser to Nicholas II, the Governor-General of Moscow and the executioner of Moscow workers in the 1905 revolution. The murder was committed on the square near the Moscow Kremlin.
On May 9, at 4 o’clock in the morning, a steamship departed from the pier of the St. Petersburg city administration, on which the convicted Kalyaev and his executioner were delivered to Shlisselburg.
On May 10, at 2 o'clock in the morning, Kalyaev was hanged in the fortress courtyard, behind the arena building, not far from the fortress wall facing the left bank of the Neva, and was buried on an island outside the fortress.
In a letter written before the treasury, Kalyaev addressed his comrades: “... if someday at the peak of national rejoicing you remember me, then let all my work as a revolutionary be for you an expression of my enthusiastic love for the people.”
About three months have passed since the execution of Kalyaev, and again a scaffold was erected in the Shlisselburg fortress, this time for two convicts - Khaim Gershkovich and Alexander Vasiliev.
Chaim Gershkovich - worker, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, born in 1886 in a poor Jewish family. At the age of 17, he was first arrested in Odessa during a workers' demonstration. Exiled under police supervision to the Arkhangelsk province for 5 years, Gershkovich fled to London and then returned illegally to Russia. On June 30, 1905, during a search of the apartment in which he was located, Gershkovich offered armed resistance to the police, was arrested and, by order of the St. Petersburg Governor General Trepov, was put on trial by military court. On June 18, the military district court sentenced him to death.
Gershkovich was executed on August 20, 1905, on the same day as twenty-year-old worker Alexander Vasilyev, who killed the police station guard.
The last two executions were carried out in the Shlisselburg fortress in 1906. On August 29, 1906, Z. V. Konoplyannikova was hanged in the small courtyard of the citadel, sentenced by the military district court for the murder of General Min, the commander of the Semenovsky regiment, who participated in the suppression of the December armed uprising of 1905 in Moscow. Less than a month later, on September 19, 1906, the revolutionary worker Vasiliev-Finkelstein was executed in the fortress, convicted of a terrorist act: he tried to kill the St. Petersburg Governor-General Trepov, famous for his order during the 1905 revolution: “Do not fire empty volleys, Don't skimp on ammunition." By mistake, he killed General Kozlov, mistaking him for Trepov. At the trial, he did not give his real name, and his documents were in the name of the peasant V.V. Vasilyev. Only after the Great October Socialist Revolution did the Society of Political Prisoners receive a letter from a workers' faculty student, Finkelstein, who wrote that his brother Ya.B. Finkelstein was executed in the Shlisselburg fortress in 1906. Then documents were found that confirmed this.

The places of executions in the fortress are marked with memorial plaques.

After the defeat of the first Russian revolution, the years of reaction began. The tsarist government put thousands of proletarian revolutionaries and Bolsheviks in prison, exile, and hard labor. Everywhere in Russia - in Orel and Pskov, Smolensk and Riga, Yaroslavl and Vologda, Saratov and
Tobolsk - new convict centrals were built, which were supposed to absorb not dozens, as before, but hundreds and thousands of political enemies of the autocracy.
“The tsarist government, landowners and capitalists,” wrote V.I. Lenin, “frantically took revenge on the revolutionary classes, and the proletariat in the first place, for the revolution,”
as if in a hurry to take advantage of the break in the mass struggle to destroy their enemies."
From the first months of 1907, the creation of a new convict prison began in the Shlisselburg fortress. The old soldiers' barracks, which had existed since 1728, was rebuilt - a third floor was erected above it, where a prison hospital was located, and eight general prison cells were equipped on the first and second floors. This is how the first prison building arose, which prisoners called the “menagerie”. This name was explained by the special arrangement of the common cells, which were separated from the corridor not by a wall, but by an iron grate from floor to ceiling. Each cell was designed for 15 prisoners. Internal organization All cells were the same: each had folding beds and a table in the form of two boards attached to a lattice. In the corner of the cell there was an open cupboard for storing bread.
Eight chambers occupied the middle part of the “menagerie”; in that part of the building that adjoined the Svetlichnaya Tower, there were workshops: blacksmithing, metalworking and weaving; at the opposite end of the building, near the Sovereign Tower, there is an isolation ward for the mentally ill and a church.
In 1907-1908 the Old Prison was rebuilt. The old walls were dismantled and a new two-story building with 12 common cells, six on each floor, was built on the old foundation. Each cell had two windows. The windows of the cells overlooked the large courtyard of the citadel, and the windows of the corridor overlooked the small courtyard.
The rebuilt Old Prison - the second prison building - was called Sakhalin by the prisoners. This figurative name accurately reflected the purpose of this corps: as a form of punishment, those who wanted to be subjected to the most difficult regime were transferred from other corps to it.
The new (People's Will) prison, which remained without reconstruction or changes, was named the third prison building.
In 1911, construction of the largest prison building of the fortress, the fourth building, was completed. This prison had 21 general cells and 27 solitary confinement cells. There were 22 people in each general cell, and there were often two prisoners in solitary confinement. On the first (semi-basement) floor there were carpentry workshops, a clothing workshop, two steam heating stokers and ten punishment cells - seven light and three completely dark. The second floor housed the prison administration - the office, the offices of the chief and his assistant, the office, the accounting department, the waiting room for relatives, the visiting room, partitioned off by two bars: a visitor stood near the outer one, a warden stood between the bars, and the prisoner was led to the second, inner grate. In the same room, behind the second, inner grate, there were shelves with books from the prison library and a table. On the same floor there were general and solitary cells.
On the third floor there were general and solitary cells and workshops: shoemaking, sewing, weaving. On the fourth floor there are general and solitary cells and a weaving workshop. Each common cell had 22 folding beds, two tables with benches, a closet and a washbasin.
There could be about a thousand people in all four prison buildings at the same time. The prisoners of the Schlnsselburg convict prison in 1907-1917 were sailors - participants in the uprisings in Sevastopol and Kronstadt, soldiers - sappers of the rebel battalion in Kiev and Turkestan, and artillery soldiers of the Vyborg fortress, workers of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Riga and other cities, peasants of Transcaucasia and Baltic states.
Outstanding figures of the Communist Party and many of its ordinary members, active participants in the first Russian revolution and the underground work of the party during the First World War, served hard labor in the Shlisselburg prison.
The outstanding figure of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, G.K. Ordzhonikidze, spent three years in Shlisselburg. In 1911, on behalf of V.I. Lenin, he carried out enormous work to prepare the convening of the VI All-Russian Party Conference, which took place in January 1912 in Prague. At the conference he was elected a member of the party's Central Committee. Returning to Russia, Ordzhonikidze made presentations about the conference in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Baku, Tiflis, and Kyiv. Issued by an agent provocateur, he was arrested in St. Petersburg on April 14, 1912 and put in a pre-trial detention center in solitary confinement. Six months later, the St. Petersburg Military District Court pronounced a sentence: three years of hard labor followed by indefinite exile to Siberia.
It is no coincidence that Shlisselburg was chosen as the place of imprisonment for Ordzhonikidze. The Shlisselburg prison with its strict regime was considered “exemplary” by the Main Prison Directorate and excluded the possibility of escape, and this was what the tsarist government feared most, since in 1909 Ordzhonikidze managed to successfully escape from exile in the Yenisei and emigrate abroad.
On November 5, 1912, Ordzhonikidze, shackled in leg shackles, was taken to the Shlisselburg fortress and placed in the fourth prison building.
A man of enormous will and courage, Ordzhonikidze not only was not broken, but did everything to raise the morale of other prisoners. He told the convicts about the Lena events, mass strikes, about the new rise of the revolutionary movement, about the Prague Conference, about meetings with V.I. Lenin.
In March 1913, Ordzhonikidze initiated a protest by political prisoners of the fourth corps. The protest was caused by the bullying of the prison guard Sergeev against the convict Altunov. The prisoners demanded Sergeev's dismissal. This was followed by the immediate transfer of the most active protest participants to a punishment cell in the isolation ward of the first prison building - the “menagerie”. Of course, Sergo Ordzhonikidze was also sent to the isolation ward. How often Ordzhonikidze ended up in a punishment cell is indicated by the entries in the prison notebook issued to him on May 3, 1913: “Three weeks in a punishment cell (24.X-14.XI. 1913) for failure to stand up for verification”, “two weeks in a punishment cell (YULU-24. 1914) for failure to remove his trousers during a search." The entry about imprisonment in a punishment cell “from ZOL-2.11. 1915 for the warden” apparently means punishment for some kind of disobedience to the prison warden.
Ordzhonikidze’s notebooks contain many notes about the books he read. The range of his interests was extremely wide: the development of capitalism, the distant past of mankind, the imperialist war, the labor movement, the history of socialism, issues of modern technology, natural science, psychology, pedagogy, medicine, Russian and foreign fiction and finally German. While in Shlisselburg, he mastered the German language using self-taught books.
On October 8, 1915, Ordzhonikidze was sent from Shlisselburg into exile in Yakutia. He worked as a paramedic in the hospital in the village of Pokrovskoye on Lena, ninety miles from Yakutsk. Together with other Bolsheviks, he carried out party work among political exiles. February Revolution released Ordzhonikidze from exile, and in May 1917 he left for Petrograd. At the suggestion of V.I. Lenin, G.K. Ordzhonikidze was introduced to the Petrograd Committee of the RSDLP (b). When, after the July events of 1917, the party was forced to go underground, he was a liaison officer for the Central Committee and visited V.I. Lenin at Razliv station. Ordzhonikidze took an active part in the October armed uprising. During the Civil War, he was one of the political leaders of the Red Army. In 1921-1926, G.K. Ordzhonikidze worked in Transcaucasia, first as chairman of the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee, and then as first secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the Party. Since 1926, he was Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR. In 1930, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR appointed him Chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, and after the transformation of the Supreme Council of National Economy into the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry, Ordzhonikidze headed it. Factories, mines, and power plants were built under his leadership, and he was an active fighter for the implementation of the country's industrialization plan. Ordzhonikidze devoted his entire heroic life to the cause of the working class, to the cause of communism.
The Bolshevik, a party member since 1896, Fyodor Nikolaevich Petrov (1876-1973), enjoyed great authority among the political prisoners of Shlisselburg. Petrov's revolutionary activities began in the 1890s, in Marxist circles. Working as a propagandist at the Arsenal plant, at the railway depot, at the Yuzhno-Russian plant, he graduated Faculty of Medicine Kyiv University. In 1900 in Moscow, in the apartment of Dmitry Ilyich Ulyanov, F.N. Petrov first met V.I. Lenin. In 1903 he went illegal. On November 18, 1905, F.N. Petrov, together with B.P. Zhadanovsky, led the uprising of the sapper battalion in Kyiv. The rebel soldiers demanded better food and clothing, free correspondence for soldiers, the destruction of military courts, freedom of assembly and rallies, and the convening of a Constituent Assembly.
The uprising was crushed, about two hundred people died in street battles, Petrov and Zhadanovsky were seriously wounded, but their comrades managed to hide them from the police and save them. Despite the failure, the uprising in Kyiv was highly appreciated by V.I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich pointed out the need for an even closer connection between workers and soldiers in the struggle for the victory of the revolution. In the article “The Dying Autocracy and New Bodies of People’s Power” V.I. Lenin wrote: “The naval battle in Sevastopol is followed, without any interruption, by land battles in Voronezh and Kyiv. An armed uprising in this last city is apparently taking another step forward, a step towards the merging of the revolutionary army with the revolutionary proletariat and students."
Having recovered from his injury, F.N. Petrov moved to Warsaw and in 1906 headed the military-revolutionary organization of the Bolsheviks. He edited the underground newspaper "Soldier's List", wrote proclamations, distributed them among workers and soldiers, and was closely associated with F. E. Dzerzhinsky.
On April 15, 1907, Petrov was arrested and imprisoned in the tenth pavilion prison in the Warsaw Citadel, where he remained for seven months while the preliminary investigation was underway. The military district court, held in November 1907, sentenced Petrov to seven years of hard labor.
In the Shlisselburg fortress, where he was taken in 1908, F.N. Petrov waged a constant struggle with the prison administration for the rights of prisoners. During seven years of hard labor, F.N. Petrov spent 378 days in punishment cells.
In 1915, he was sent to settle in the village of Manzurka, Irkutsk province. After the Great October Socialist Revolution, he took an active part in the struggle for the establishment of Soviet power in the Far East, fought in partisan detachments against Kolchak, was a member of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), and when the Far Eastern Republic was formed in 1920, he became part of it government, was Minister of Health and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
In 1923-1927, F.N. Petrov was the head of Glavnauka (Main Directorate of Scientific, Artistic, Museum, Theater and Literary Institutions and Organizations of the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR). In 1929-1933 he headed the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (BOX).
F.N. Petrov made a huge contribution to the development of Soviet encyclopedic work. He was deputy editor-in-chief of the 1st edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, director of the Soviet Encyclopedia Institute, and a member of the chief editorial board of three editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In 1959-1973
F.N. Petrov was a member of the scientific and editorial council of the publishing house "Soviet Encyclopedia", the chief editor and member of the editorial board of many Soviet encyclopedic and dictionary publications.
For outstanding services to the Communist Party and the Soviet state, F.N. Petrov was twice awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, awarded four Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and medals.
F.N. Petrov’s comrade-in-arms B.P. Zhadanovsky lived a short but glorious life. Wounded during the sapper uprising in Kyiv in 1905, Zhadanovsky initially hid with friends, but the police managed to track him down and arrest him. A military court sentenced him to death, which was replaced with indefinite hard labor. 12 years - from 1905 to 1917 he was a prisoner of the Kyiv, Smolensk, Shlisselburg, Orel, and Kherson prisons. For his greatest fortitude, revolutionary fortitude, uncompromisingness, and fearlessness in the face of repression, his friends called him “the giant of Shlisselburg.” “We were always amazed,” recalled the Bolshevik D.A. Trilisser, “where in this small, fragile body such willpower, so much perseverance, perseverance, endurance and courage came from... A cultured, educated man, a good Marxist, he was on fire, I wanted to know everything, worked on myself, shared my knowledge with others.”
Zhadanovsky died in Crimea, near Alushta, in a battle with the White Guards in 1918.
In 1910-1912, worker Pyotr Fedorovich Anokhin, later one of the organizers of Soviet power in Karelia, served his sentence in Shlisselburg. For the attempt on the life of a gendarme non-commissioned officer in Petrozavodsk in 1909, the St. Petersburg Military District Court sentenced him to death, commuted to hard labor. The Shlisselburg fortress became a school of struggle and political maturity for Anokhin.
In 1912, after a stay in the fortress, he was sent into exile, which he served at the Zima station in the Irkutsk province.
Returning to Petrozavodsk in January 1918, a Bolshevik hardened by prison and exile, P.F. Anokhin devoted himself entirely to party and Soviet work. He was elected chairman of the Olonets provincial executive committee. In August 1918, under his leadership, a counter-revolutionary conspiracy of officers in Petrozavodsk was uncovered. In the spring of 1919, when the threat of enemy occupation loomed over Petrozavodsk and the entire Olonets province, P.F. Anokhin headed the revolutionary committee, supervised the mobilization of people and transport, and sent equipment and food to the front. After the liberation of Karelia from the invaders, Anokhin led the creative work - with his participation, production was established at industrial enterprises, schools and boarding schools opened. He was elected as a delegate to the VIII, IX and X party congresses. At the VIII All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Anokhin was elected a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
In 1921, the Central Committee of the Party sent Anokhin to the Far East as a member of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). He was the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Far Eastern Republic in negotiations with Japan.
On May 10, 1922, Anokhin was killed by white bandits at the 33rd kilometer of the Vitimsky tract, near Chita.
P.F. Anokhin, who went through the harsh school of the underground, hard labor and exile, devoted his entire short life to the liberation of the working class, and became one of the leaders of the first Soviets in Karelin. The workers of Karelia carefully preserve the memory of P.F. Anokhin; one of the streets and the printing house in Petrozavodsk, where P.F. Anokhin worked, is named after him. One of the Ladoga ships bears the name of the glorious Bolshevik. Active organizers of collective protests of political prisoners in Shlisselburg were R.M. Semenchikov and K.Ya Luke.
From a young age, Roman Matveevich Semenchikov took part in the revolutionary movement of textile workers in Shuya and Ivanovo-Voznesensk. Until 1905, the tsarist court twice sentenced him to prison. Since 1905, Semenchikov, under the name of Stepan Ivanovich Zakharov, worked in the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP in Riga, organized and led a fighting squad.
Thanks to his courage and talent as an organizer and agitator, Semenchikov gained enormous authority among Latvian and Russian workers in Riga. Together with other militants, he was arrested at an illegal meeting on December 18, 1905 and imprisoned in Riga prison. The military court sentenced Zakharov and four of his comrades - Rubinstein, Verba, Krastyn and Grinberg to death, and the rest to hard labor.
Having learned about the court's decision, the workers of Riga went on strike and achieved a review of the case. New court replaced the death penalty with 15 years of hard labor, which Semenchikov served in Smolensk, Shlisselburg and Siberian prisons.
In Shlisselburg, Semenchikov kept a diary in which, along with a description of the conditions of imprisonment and prison life, there were many thoughts about the revolution and its future. “The revolution is not over,” he wrote, “because its tasks have not been resolved. There is a calm before the storm. The events of 1905 will be repeated on a larger scale.” In one of his letters, he noted that the reaction could not hold out for long, “after all, factories and mills are working. This means that capitalization and proletarianization are taking place, and therefore the labor movement, this source of the revolution, is awakening.” In prison, R.M. Semenchikov prepared for the future struggle against the autocracy. “We need to sharpen our theoretical weapons,” he wrote, “to make sure that the time of imprisonment plays the role of university training for revolutionaries...”
The jailers oppressed the prisoner in every possible way, transferred him to worse cells, took away his books and writing materials, but he did not lose heart. “Even if it won’t be soon, what a disaster - after all, it will happen after all,” Semenchikov wrote. “No one can take this consolation away from me...” “Sometimes I feel such an uplift of spirit that I’m surprised how these damned walls don’t will fall under his pressure."
In the summer of 1909, Semenchikov was sent to the Algachin convict prison in Siberia, and a year later he was transferred to Gorny Zerentui, where he died in the prison hospital on April 13, 1911 from cardiac paralysis.
“I need a feat in life,” R.M. Semenchikov wrote in his diary. His life was truly a feat in the struggle for the liberation of the working people.
Karl Yanovich Luke (1888-1932) - member of the RSDLP since 1904. From the age of sixteen he took part in the revolutionary movement of Latvia, was a commissar of rebel peasant detachments. In 1911, the St. Petersburg Trial Chamber sentenced him to six years of hard labor for belonging to the Libau organization of the RSDLP.
After the trial, K.Ya.Luke was sent to the Shlisselburg convict prison. In 1912, for organizing a collective protest of convicts K.Ya. Luks, B.P. Zhadanovsky, I.Ya. Korotkov and others were transferred to the Oryol Central. In 1916, Luke was sent into exile in Eastern Siberia, in Nizhieudinsk. After the October Revolution, he took part in the civil war, fought in partisan detachments, was the chief of staff of partisan formations in Eastern Transbaikalia, and commander of the troops of the Chita District. When the Far Eastern Republic was formed in 1920, Luke entered its government as Minister of National Affairs.
After the Civil War, Luke actively participated in building a new life, was the chairman of the joint-stock company "Book Business", the representative of the Main Science at the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR in the Far East, the director of the Khabarovsk Museum of Local Lore, since 1926 he headed the Committee for Assistance to the Northern Outskirts of the Country (Committee of the North), Luke did a lot did to organize the life of small nations on the basis of socialism, to create a national intelligentsia, and to boost the economy of the North. He traveled to the most remote areas, organized scientific expeditions, supervised the construction of cultural centers in the North, which included boarding schools with educational workshops, clubs (“red yarangas”), medical centers, veterinary and zootechnical centers, and mechanical workshops.
In 1929, Luke was appointed rector of the Institute of Northern Peoples, newly formed in Leningrad. Within a year, he managed to organize the work of a new educational institution and again left for the North. During an expedition of 1930-1932 in the town of Kalk-Podvolok, in the northeastern part of Yakutia, a tragic accident cut short his life: K.Ya.Luke died while discharging a hard drive.
Among the political prisoners of Shlisselburg there were not only members of the Bolshevik Party, but also representatives of other political parties: anarchists, socialist-revolutionaries, maximalists (a group of terrorists that emerged from the Socialist Revolutionary Party as its left wing). The daily communication of these political prisoners with the Bolsheviks in the Shlisselburg fortress had a great influence on them. Some of them (P.F. Vinogradov, I.P. Zhuk, V.O. Lichtenstadt and others) renounced their erroneous views while still in prison, became convinced Marxists, switched to the positions of the Bolsheviks and, leaving the fortress, selflessly fought for Soviet power.
Vladimir Osipovich Lichtenstadt (1882-1919), son of a state councilor, studied at St. Petersburg and Leipzig universities. On August 21, 1907, the St. Petersburg Military District Court sentenced him to death for participation in preparing the explosion of the dacha of the Prime Minister of the Tsarist Government, Stolypin, on August 12, 1906 on Aptekarsky Island. When the verdict was confirmed, Lichtenstadt was sentenced to indefinite penal servitude, and in May 1908 he was transferred from the Peter and Paul Fortress to the Shlisselburg Fortress, where he proved himself to be one of the most active and authoritative organizers of the fight against the Tsarist jailers.
In Shlisselburg, Vladimir Osipovich was one of the most active organizers and creators of the prison library. Work in the library captivated him entirely, he wrote in his diary: “With your head in library matters, it is impossible to read or write: you live like a hungry man among the abundance of food and not you can get your fill..."
Lichtenstadt came to Shlisselburg young, but already solidly educated in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, philosophy, literature, but even in prison he continued to read and study. During the years of imprisonment, he became a versatile educated person. In Shlisselburg, great changes took place in Lichtenstadt's worldview. The Shlisselburg penal servitude became for him a true school of political education. His prison comrade I.I. Genkin wrote later: “... back in Shlisselburg he began to evolve from vague populist views to Marxism and from the neo-idealistic constructions of German professors to a materialistic worldview.”
G.K. Ordzhonikidze, B.P. Zhadanovsky, F.N. Petrov had a great influence on the formation of Marxist views in Lichtenstadt. On October 5, 1915, Lichtenstadt wrote in his diary: “...Ordzhonikidze left today. This is a great loss for me. What a lively, open character, so much energy, responsiveness to everything! And most importantly, the man is always working on himself... With One could have a serious discussion with him on theoretical issues, talk about the book he had read..."
The February Revolution of 1917 opened the doors of prisons. Lichtenstadt was among the first political prisoners of Shlisselburg to receive the certificate: “Liberated by the will of the insurgent people.”
At the beginning of 1919, he joined the Bolshevik Party. The party instructed him to organize the publication of the magazine "Communist International". When Yudenich's army approached Petrograd, Lichtenstadt asked to be sent to the front. He was appointed commissar of the 6th division. Lichtenstadt died on October 15, 1919 on the Yamburg front, near Kipenya. On December 15, his ashes were transferred to the Field of Mars in Petrograd.
Pavlin Fedorovich Vinogradov, who was serving his sentence at the same time as Lichtenstadt, was put on trial for refusing military service for political reasons. This fact was noted in the central organ of the Bolsheviks - the newspaper Pravda. “Last week,” Pravda reported, “the arrested soldier Pavlin Vinogradov was brought from the Narva guardhouse, accused of refusing to take an oath. The investigation is over, and the trial will take place at the end of June.” The trial took place on June 28, 1912. He was sentenced to serve in a disciplinary battalion for six years. But even here Vinogradov declared that he would not serve the Tsar and began to lead among
soldiers revolutionary propaganda.
In February 1913, he again appeared before the St. Petersburg Military District Court, which sentenced him to 4 years 11 months of hard labor “for deliberate refusal due to his convictions to perform military service.” Then he still did not understand that, being on military service, you can work for the revolution. After the trial, shackled, Vinogradov was sent to Shlisselburg. From the very first days he became involved in common struggle prisoners with the prison administration for human conditions of existence. Neither the punishment cells nor the beatings of the jailers broke Vinogradov. He looked at his stay in prison as a temporary break from the revolutionary struggle, which he needed to use to replenish his knowledge. He studied philosophy, political economy, and military affairs.
In 1916, Vinogradov was transferred to the Alexander Central (75 kilometers from Irkutsk), from where he was freed by the February Revolution. Pavlin Fedorovich returned to Petrograd, took part in organizing combat detachments of the Red Guard, in arming the workers, and in the storming of the Winter Palace.
In February 1918, Vinogradov was sent to Arkhangelsk to organize food aid for the workers of revolutionary Petrograd. He sent two food trains to Petrograd, while he himself remained to work in Arkhangelsk. When Arkhangelsk was captured by the Anglo-American and French invaders in August 1918, Vinogradov moved to Kotlas and, following the directive of V.I. Lenin, formed and led the North Dvina River Flotilla. On September 8, 1918, P.F. Vinogradov died in battle with the interventionists. He was buried with revolutionary honors in Petrograd at the Volkovsky cemetery. The workers of Arkhangelsk honor the memory of the hero of the civil war. Vinogradovsky is the name given to the area where Pavlin Vinogradov fought and died. The central street of Arkhangelsk bears his name. The steamship "Pavlin Vinogradov" sails along the Northern Dvina.
Justin Petrovich Zhuk, one of the leaders of the Cherkassy group of “anarchist-communists,” spent nine years in Shlisselburg. When arrested in 1908, he offered armed resistance, trying to blow up himself and the gendarmes with a bomb. The Kiev Military District Court sentenced him to death, which was commuted to indefinite hard labor.
In Shlisselburg, I.P. Zhuk actively participated in all collective protests of political prisoners, and was distinguished by exceptional courage, strong will, and hatred of the oppressors.
After his release from the fortress on February 28, 1917, he remained to work at the Shlisselburg gunpowder factory. Together with the Bolsheviks he fought for the victory of the socialist revolution.
After the victory of the October Revolution, Justin Zhuk organized the work of the plant, organized supplies and living conditions for the workers. On his initiative and project, the plant began to develop the production of wine sugar from sawdust. In 1919, he was one of the first, with a detachment of former Shlisselburg residents and factory workers, to go to the front to defend Petrograd from Yudenich’s gangs and was appointed a member of the military council of the Karelian section of the Petrograd Front. I.P. Zhuk heroically died in battles with the White Guards on October 24, 1919 near the Gruzino station. Streets in the village named after N.A. Morozov and in the city of Petrokrepost are named after him.
1917 - Last year existence of the Shlisselburg prison. Prisoners increasingly began to receive news of strikes, demonstrations, and unrest in the capital and in large industrial centers of the country. This news inspired hope for a speedy release, but the prisoners of Shlisselburg still did not know much. They did not know that in the February days of 1917 revolutionary battles were unfolding in Petrograd, that the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, at its first meeting on February 27, 1917, decided to immediately release the political prisoners of the Lisselburg prison. The workers of the Shlisselburg gunpowder plant undertook to implement this decision, disarming the police and taking power in the city and at the plant into their own hands.
On February 28, 70 political prisoners were released from prison. Among them were V.O. Lichtenstadt, father and son I.E. and I.I. Pyanykh, V.A. Simonovich, V.D. Malashkin, I.P. Zhuk and others. Singing revolutionary songs and shouting "Hurray!" The liberated convicts were met by a crowd of thousands of workers outside the prison gates.
The revolutionary committee of the Shlisselburg gunpowder factory decided the next day, March 1, to release all prisoners of the Shlisselburg prison. A fighting squad was organized, headed by I.P. Zhuk and F.A. Shavishvili. We managed to get some weapons: there were fears that the prison guards would offer armed resistance. But there was no need to storm the fortress. After brief negotiations, the head of the prison, Zimberg, presented V.O. Lichtenstadt with the keys to the fortress.
The revolutionary committee of the Shlisselburg gunpowder factory, which included liberated political convicts, took into its own hands the solution of all urgent matters - placing the Shlisselburg residents in workers' homes, issuing special certificates to all convicts, which stated that they were liberated from the Shlisselburg fortress "by the will of the insurgent people." At the same time, the Revolutionary Committee decided to burn the prison buildings of Shlisselburg, taking out all valuable property, weapons, food supplies, and the prison library. Then, in February-March 1917, there was still no complete confidence in the victory of the revolution; they were afraid of the possibility of using the fortress as a prison if reaction returned.
On the night of March 4-5, all prison buildings burst into flames at the same time. “...For several days, with a huge red torch, illuminating the distances of Ladoga, the old prison burned, a symbolic beacon on the verge of the old world fading into the darkness of oblivion and on the ruins of its emerging bright day,” wrote its former prisoner I.P. about the end of the Shlisselburg prison .Voronitsyn.
IN difficult years civil war, the workers of Petrograd honored the memory of the fallen prisoners of the Shlisselburg fortress by unveiling a monument.
The grand opening of the monument on January 22, 1919 was attended by delegations from communists and workers of Petrograd and the city of Shlisselburg, former prisoners of the fortress. The monument by sculptor I.Ya.Gintsburg was installed in the north-eastern part of the island, behind the fortress wall, near the Royal Tower, where the gendarmes buried those who died in 1884-1906 in the fortress of the revolutionaries. The initiative to build the monument belonged to the former Shlisselburg resident M.V. Novorussky.
After the October Revolution began new story Shlisselburg fortress. In 1925, the fortress, as a structure of great historical significance, was taken under state security and transferred by the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR to the authority of the People's Commissariat for Education. The People's Commissariat for Education was to organize a museum in the Shlisselburg Fortress, joining it as a branch of the Leningrad Museum of the Great October Socialist Revolution, and develop a plan for the restoration of buildings damaged by the fire.
The restoration of the fortress was entrusted to the Leningrad branch of the Main Science and the Leningrad restoration workshop. The restorers were assisted by a special commission consisting of representatives of the Museum of the October Revolution, the Shlisselburg community and the All-Union Society of Political Prisoners and Exiled Settlers.
On August 26, 1928, a museum was opened in the fortress in a solemn ceremony. Numerous delegations of workers from Leningrad and Shlisselburg, representatives of party, trade union and scientific organizations, employees of the Museum of the October Revolution, members of the Society of Political Prisoners and the Shlisselburg Community arrived. A rally of thousands took place. The President of the Academy of Sciences A.P. Karpinsky, former People's Will members A.V. Pribylev and S.P. Shvetsov, from the Shlisselburg community - D.A. Trilisser, from the workers of Leningrad - A.P. Kostin and others spoke at it.
The exhibitions and monuments of the new branch of the Museum of the October Revolution aroused great interest among workers. Visitors to the museum were left with an indelible impression from examining the prison buildings, cells, and punishment cells.
Articles, essays, information, reference materials, reports about Shlisselburg and the opening of a museum there dedicated to prisoners of the fortress of the 18th-20th centuries were published in "Red Gazeta", "Leningradskaya Pravda", the magazine "Red Panorama" and in other periodicals .
In 1939, due to the complicated international situation, the museum in the Shlisselburg fortress was closed and the exhibits were taken to Leningrad, to the Museum of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

HEROIC DEFENSE OF THE FORTRESS IN 1941-1943

In 1941-1943, for almost 500 days, a small garrison staunchly defended the Shlisselburg fortress. Despite numerous attempts, the fascist troops failed to cross to the right bank of the Neva and close the siege of Leningrad. The heroic defense of the fortress revived the military glory of ancient Oreshok.
The defense of the fortress began when the 1st division of the NKVD troops defending Shlisselburg was forced, under pressure from superior enemy forces, to leave the city and cross to the right bank of the Neva.
Having captured Shlisselburg on September 8, 1941, the Nazis cut all land communications along the left bank of the Neva and the waterway along the river. The blockade of Leningrad began. The Oreshek fortress was on the front line of the Leningrad Front.
The 1st division of the NKVD troops, which retreated to the right bank of the Neva, took up defense in the area from the village of Koshkino to Nevskaya Dubrovka from September 8, 1941. The Shlisselburg fortress became an important stronghold of the 1st division of the NKVD troops. The village named after Morozov was defended by the 2nd regiment of the division, commanded from September 1941 to April 1942 by Major A.A. Zolotarev. The head of the border troops of the Leningrad district, General G.A. Stepanov, and the commander of the Leningrad Front, K.E. Voroshilov, set him the task of first of all strengthening the Shlisselburg fortress and preventing the Nazis from crossing the Neva.
By order of the commander of the 1st division of the NKVD troops, Colonel S.I. Donskov, on the night of September 9, 1941, reconnaissance of the fortress was organized by two platoons. It was not occupied by the enemy. A platoon of our fighters immediately took up a perimeter defense. It was at dawn on September 9, 1941. Thus began the heroic defense of the fortress by Soviet soldiers, which lasted 498 days, until January 18, 1943, when Shlisselburg was liberated from the Nazis.
On September 10, the fortress was inspected by the representative of the Military Council of the Leningrad Front, General V.V. Semashko, the commander of the 1st division of the NKVD troops, Colonel S.I. Donskov and Captain N.I. Chugunov, appointed commandant of the fortress. A day later, V.A. Marulin, political instructor of one of the companies, was appointed military commissar. On September 11, 1941, the command of the 1st division of the NKVD troops issued an order to create a garrison of the fortress. He was given the task of preventing the enemy from crossing to the right bank of the Neva.
The garrison was separated from the Soviet troops on the right bank by a wide channel of the Neva, which significantly complicated its supply of food and ammunition. The crossings across the river by fighters Evgeny Ustinenkov and Vasily Kasatkin, who served as boatmen, remained memorable for the rest of their lives.
How especially difficult they recalled the period of white nights, when even the smallest object on the water surface was visible at 1000-1500 meters. It was impossible to go on boats unnoticed either to the shore or to the fortress. On boats, most often it was possible to break through only in one direction. From the fortress to the shore the path was easier. They walked calmly until the middle of the river, because the enemy machine gunners did not see the boat: it was hidden by the fortress. But on the second half of the journey, the boat came into view and came under machine-gun fire. It was more difficult to cross from the shore to the fortress. The enemy opened fire on the boat as soon as it left the barge that served as the pier, and held it at gunpoint until the middle of the river. When the boat left the sector of machine-gun fire, mortars began to hit it. Not everyone could withstand such stress, but rowers Kasatkin, Ustinenkov, Korgalev and others made this heroic transition from the right bank to the fortress every day.
There were about 300 people in the garrison. Initially it consisted of a rifle company. In October 1941, by decision of the command of the 302nd separate artillery division of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet, the 409th naval battery, whose personnel numbered 60-65 people, arrived at the fortress. The battery was commanded by Captain P.N. Kochanenkov, and the military commissar was A.G. Morozov. Five 45-mm guns of the 409th battery were placed in the loopholes of the Royal Tower and on the bastion.
The soldiers of the division's rifle company equipped their firing points in the fortress wall between the Golovin, Golovkin, and Flagnaya towers, facing Shlisselburg, which was occupied by the Nazis. They punched embrasures in the fortress wall to install machine guns. The firing points were named by conventional names: “Dunya”, “Duck”, “Seagull”, “Nut”, “Funnel”, “Alder”, “Russia”, “Ermak”, “Oak”, “Motherland”, “Goose” , "Starling", "Baikal".
The garrison was located in the lower tiers of the towers: in the Korolevskaya - sailors of the 409th battery, in the Flazhnaya, Golovkin and Golovin towers - infantry units. The dungeon of the Svetlichnaya Tower was dedicated to a medical station. The Golovkin Tower occupied a special place in the defense of the fortress. A rifle platoon was located in its lower room. Here, close to the walls, they placed bunks on which the soldiers slept, and in the middle of the room there was a table, which was lit by a smokehouse from a tin can. In two niches on the sides, which at one time served as embrasures, there were metal beds for the commandant and commissar of the garrison. Rifles were stored in two pyramids in the room. For heating, they installed a stove made from an iron barrel.
From the end of September 1941, fascist artillery began massive shelling of the fortress, apparently setting the goal of wiping it off the face of the earth. These were difficult days for the garrison. The situation on the section of the Leningrad Front along the Neva was tense. From September 10 to 26, our troops conducted the Sinyavin offensive operation, occupied a bridgehead in the Moscow Dubrovka area, on the left bank of the Neva, and tried to expand it.
On September 27-28, 1941, the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division of the NKVD troops received an order from the command of the Leningrad Front to concentrate in Oreshok at night, cross the Neva on boats and with an unexpected blow knock out the Nazis from Shlisselburg. Unfortunately, this operation was not successful. But it showed the importance of Oreshok: the fortress served as a bridgehead and also provided fire support for the offensive. The active actions of the Oreshk garrison and the attempt to drive the enemy out of Shlisselburg did not allow the fascist command to transfer reinforcements from Shlisselburg to the Moscow Dubrovka area.
After this, massive shelling of the fortress became systematic. The garrison did not leave the battle. The Nazis methodically bombarded the fortress around the clock with long-range guns and mortars. Hundreds of shells and mines exploded in it. Fascist aviation also got involved. Air bombs also began to fall on the fortress. Soon all the buildings were destroyed. Stone and brick turned to dust. A brown cloud hung over the island all the time, the Garrison went underground - into basements and dugouts.
The already difficult communication with troops on the right bank and securing the fortress became more complicated. And a permanent crossing was vital for the garrison. It was necessary to replenish the supply of ammunition, remove the wounded, deliver food and uniforms. The rowing team carried out their difficult, deadly job every day. Not one of the boatmen was killed or wounded.
The meager entries in the handwritten journal kept by the fighters give an idea of ​​the combat life of the defenders of the fortress. Here are some of them.
“October 15, 1941. The enemy fired 30 shells and 50 mines at the fortress. The crew of the 45-mm cannon was disabled - 5 people were wounded: V.P. Volkov, Zvyazenko, Bondarenko, A.P. Makarov, Tishchenko.
October 25, 1941 The enemy fired 20 shells and 80 mines at the fortress. P.P. Ershov and M.A. Ganin were wounded.
June 7, 1942 The enemy opened mortar and artillery fire on the fortress and the crossing. In total, about 800 mines and about 100 shells were fired. A.N. Fedoseev was seriously wounded and died soon after.
June 17, 1942 From 6.00 to 11.30, direction from the south, coordinates not established, the enemy fired at the fortress from heavy guns with concrete-piercing shells. 248 shells were fired. The Royal Tower was destroyed, 4 sailors' cannons were disabled."
This is how the heroic garrison lived and fought for all 498 days. Winter made the difficulties worse. It was -30 degrees below zero, and freezing winds were blowing from Lake Ladoga. It was especially difficult for the soldiers who served at firing points and observation posts.
There was a shortage of food. Food rations were meager. There were days when the soldiers received the same ration of food as the residents of besieged Leningrad.
But neither the fierce enemy fire raids, nor the cold, nor hunger shook the Soviet soldiers. They not only steadfastly held the defense, but inflicted increasingly significant losses on the Nazis. The enemy was monitored around the clock; artillery fire, mortars and machine guns destroyed his firing points and fortifications. The fortress deprived the Nazis of the opportunity to build new fortifications and kept them in constant tension.
As a symbol of the invincibility of the garrison, a red flag fluttered over the fortress. It was strengthened on a high water tower that existed on the corner of the citadel (on the site of the Bell Tower, which was dismantled in the 1880s). It was first erected on September 23, 1941 by soldiers S, A, Levchenko and S. Kuznetsov. The flag infuriated the Nazis. As soon as he soared above the fortress, the Nazis immediately opened fire on him from a 37-mm cannon. Tracer shells dug into the masonry of the tower, breaking off pieces of brick, but the flag stood, although it was all cut up by bullets and shrapnel. During September and October 1941, the Nazis still managed to knock down the flag more than once. The defenders of the fortress raised it again and again until the Germans destroyed the tower with continuous shelling. Then the flag was moved to the bell tower of St. John's Cathedral. It was first raised to the bell tower on May 1, 1942. The Germans began to furiously fire at the cathedral, which was soon also badly destroyed. However, the bell tower remained intact. The flag flew over it until the end of the defense.
Oreshok's artillery caused great damage to the enemy in manpower and equipment. In 1942, the 409th battery alone destroyed 4 separate guns, 2 mortar batteries, 3 separate mortars, 11 bunkers and dugouts, and 17 machine gun points. It suppressed 5 artillery batteries, 4 separate guns, 1 mortar battery, 5 separate mortars. Artillerymen, mortarmen, machine gunners and snipers also made a great contribution to the common cause of fighting the enemy.
A 76-mm gun called "Dunya" arrived at the fortress in July 1942 to replace a gun of the same caliber that was destroyed during shelling. The "Dunya" crew - commander Sergeant S.A. Rusinov, gunner I.I. Kanashin - soon became one of the best in the fortress. A significant event is associated with this cannon: in 1943, during the breaking of the blockade, the last shot was fired from the fortress.
There were excellent machine gunners in the fortress. The machine guns installed in the embrasures of the fortress wall facing Shlisselburg occupied a convenient and advantageous position: from here it was possible to fire on the main streets of the city and on the defensive lines of the Nazis on the edge of the Novoladozhsky Canal. Machine gunner V.M. Trankov and his number two N.A. Yakovlev installed their heavy machine gun in a breach in the fortress wall near the Golovkin tower. Their machine gun was aimed at the main street of Shlisselburg. According to the fortress commissar V.A. Marulin, these machine gunners destroyed at least 60 fascists.
Next to the Golovin tower in the embrasure of the fortress wall there was a machine gun of private Idiat Ataulin. He was much older than other fighters in the Komsomol youth garrison of the fortress. In battles with the Nazis, Ataulin showed great courage. The Germans constantly fired at the firing points of the fortress, and often the rubble from the destruction of the fortress wall covered the embrasure of his machine gun. With the onset of darkness, Ataulin himself, without any order, went outside the fortress wall to clear the embrasure. He never allowed others to do this dangerous work. “You can’t, you’re young, you need to live a long, long time,” he told his comrades.
The snipers of the fortress - fighters P.I. Sobolkov, K. Boyarsky, I.T. Dolinsky, S. Kuznetsov, S.A. Levchenko, L.M. Glazman, I.E. Chubtsov and others destroyed dozens of Nazis.
Waging a heroic struggle against the enemy, the defenders of the fortress drew strength from the consciousness of the righteousness of their cause, from the thought that they were defending Leningrad - the city of Lenin, the city of the Great October Revolution. The soldiers and commanders received great moral support from the working people of Leningrad. Several times in the fortress, meetings were held between the garrison and delegations of workers from Leningrad enterprises, who, despite all the difficulties of the journey, were transported to the fortress. Such meetings were mutually necessary and left a deep imprint on the minds of their participants.
Workers from one of the Leningrad factories arrived at the fortress on November 6, 1941, on the eve of the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution. They got acquainted with the combat life of the garrison, told how the workers of Leningrad, blockaded by the enemy, live and work in the name of Victory, and gave the order: “Fight to the death and do not let the Nazi invaders into Leningrad.” The defenders of the fortress vowed to die, but to defend the city of Lenin. Solemn meetings dedicated to the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution were held in the Supervisory Corps and the Royal Tower. The soldiers were given gifts from Leningraders.
In the spring of 1942, the Nazis intensified shelling of the fortress. The fascists were especially angry on the eve of the holiday of international workers' solidarity - May 1. The garrison prepared together to celebrate this holiday. Discussions and ceremonial meetings were held in the units. The division command sent an appeal to the soldiers of the fortress: “When the jubilant people ring the alarm bell of their victory over the frenzied enemy,” it said, “then their joyful gaze will be turned to you, comrades. And your valor, courage and heroism will be recorded on the walls of the fortress in gold letters: “Here in 1941-1942. Soviet heroes-heroes fought a mortal battle with the German occupiers for our shrine - the city of Lenin." Your names will go down in history, and it will sacredly preserve them. Your unprecedented and boundless military deeds will go down in centuries." The appeal was greeted by the garrison with great enthusiasm and excitement.
On the night of May 1, the sailors raised a new red flag to the bell tower of the cathedral, which, with the onset of day, they saw on both the right and left banks. The Nazis subjected the fortress to fierce shelling. At first they fired only from light guns and mortars, then heavy shells began to explode in the fortress. The Nazis spared neither mines nor shells for shelling the fortress. On some days, such as June 17, 1942, more than a thousand shells and mines were rained down on the fortress.
The diary of a German officer found at the site of the fighting in Shlisselburg in 1943 testifies to the heavy enemy fire raids the defenders of the fortress had to repel.
Here is an entry relating to September 21, 1941: “For the past 24 hours a red cloud has been hanging over the fortress. Dozens of our heavy guns are hitting it continuously. Because of this cloud we cannot see the walls. All thunder. We were deaf from this squall. How are they? In any case, I wouldn't want to be in their place. I feel sorry for them... 13 o'clock. Our guns stopped firing. The cloud has cleared. The fortress stands like a rock with gnawed rocks. Again we can't see anything. The Russians opened fire from the fortress. It seems there are even more of them. Don't raise your heads, their bullets await us at every step. How did they manage to survive?"
As a result of brutal shelling by fascist artillery, the fortress garrison suffered significant losses in personnel. In the list of wounded and killed soldiers of the fortress, stored in State Museum history of Leningrad, there are 115 people. More than half of this number of Oreshk defenders were seriously wounded and were evacuated. Several dozen fighters died - some in the fortress, others in hospitals after being evacuated from the fortress. Many soldiers died while crossing the Neva.
Enemy shelling did not break the fortitude of the garrison. Among the defenders of Oreshok there were genuine heroes. Among them are fighters Stepan Levchenko, Ivan Dolinsky, Vladimir Trankov, Vasily Kasatkin, Evgeniy Ustinenkov, Seraphim Kuznetsov, sailors Konstantin Shklyar, Vladimir Konkov, Vladimir Shelepen, Nikolai Konyushkin and others.
On September 10, 1942, there was a holiday in the fortress: many sailors and command staff of the 409th battery were awarded for their courage and heroism in the fight against the fascist invaders. The battery commander P.N. Kochanenkov was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner was awarded to the military commissar of the battery A.G. Morozov, sailors N.V. Konyushkin, K.L. Shklyar, V.I. Shelepen. Several people were awarded the Order of the Red Star and the medal "For Courage".
Many commanders and soldiers of the rifle units of the fortress were awarded orders and medals. The homeland highly appreciated their feat. It is not for nothing that the commissar of the fortress garrison V.A. Marulin entitled his memoirs: “The stone was collapsing, but the people stood...” He emphasized the feeling of pride that he felt and feels from the knowledge that from September 1941 to October 1942, in Over the course of a formidable and harsh thirteen months, he happened to be among the defenders of the Shlisselburg fortress, to witness truly heroic achievements.
Commissioner of the 409th Naval Battery A.G. Morozov wrote: “The Oreshk garrison fulfilled the tasks assigned to it with honor for sixteen months in a row. The Nazis managed to destroy stone walls and fortifications. They distorted the metal on the ceilings of buildings, but they did not break the spirit and fortitude "Soviet soldiers who were in Oreshka. People born of the Great October Revolution, brought up on the immortal ideas of V.I. Lenin, turned out to be stronger than metal and stone."
The garrison of the fortress was made into a single monolith by its party organization. In 1942 it increased by 27 people. Members of the party were rifle platoon commander Sergeant G.D. Tsvetkov, gun commander Private N.I. Netuzhilov, sniper and reconnaissance Private S.A. Levchenko, sniper Private L.M. Glazman, company foreman I.I. Vorobyov, machine gunner Private N.A. Yakovlev and other fighters.
The position of the fortress depended on the events that took place in neighboring sectors of the Leningrad Front. As already mentioned, the fortress was a forward stronghold of the 46th Infantry Division (formerly the 1st Division of the NKVD troops), which defended the right bank of the Neva. Of all the divisions of the division, the Oreshka garrison was closest to the enemy, so it had a special responsibility: it had to be the first to take the blow of the fascist troops if they went on the offensive. The fortress garrison showed through its military actions that it was ready to carry out this important task.
But the fascist troops had no time for an offensive. On the morning of January 12, 1943, the thunder of artillery guns rang out on the banks of the Neva, signaling the beginning of the offensive of Soviet troops with the aim of breaking the blockade of Leningrad.

Address: Russia, Leningrad region, Walnut Island
Date of foundation: 1323
Number of towers: 5
Coordinates: 59°57"13.4"N 31°02"18.1"E

The grandiose Fort Oreshek is also known as Noteburg and Shlisselburg Fortress. It flaunts at the very sources of the Neva. You can see ancient fortifications near the city of Shlisselburg, on Orekhovy Island. It was from him that the fortress received such an unusual name.

Bird's eye view of the Oreshek Fortress

Features of the architecture of the ancient fort

The majestic defense structure occupies almost the entire island. There are five fortress towers along the powerful wall. All of them have a round shape, with the exception of the quadrangular Gate. In the northeast of the fortress there is a citadel. Previously, it was crowned by three towers, but to date only one has survived.

In addition to defensive functions, the powerful fortress also solved other problems. For two centuries it was used by the government of Tsarist Russia as a political prison.

Gosudarev (left) and Golovin (center) towers of the fortress

Today, the ancient fortress is neither a defender of the city nor a prison. Now her attractive ensemble has become a branch of the St. Petersburg Historical Museum.

History of the ancient fort

The first mentions of the Orekhovoy fort are found in the famous Novgorod chronicle. It informs about the founder of the fortification and the date of construction. The first fort was built from wood in 1323 by the will of Prince Yuri Danilovich, the grandson of Alexander Nevsky. However, during the fire that engulfed the island 29 years later, such an unreliable structure burned down.

Sovereign (Gate) tower of the fortress

Soon its place was taken by a stone building measuring 100 x 90 m. Three impressive towers were built above its 3 m walls. Not far from the Shlisselburg fortification there was a settlement. The fort was separated from the suburb by a wide 3 m canal, which was subsequently filled up. At the beginning of the 15th century, the houses of the settlement were also surrounded by their own stone fence.

In connection with the inclusion of Veliky Novgorod into Muscovy, it was decided to strengthen all the fortresses located on the territory of the Novgorod lands. So, on the site of the ancient Walnut Fort, a new military fortress appeared, built according to all the requirements of defensive art. Impressive stone walls with seven towers of different shapes were erected along the coast of the island.

Ruins of the Flag Tower of the fortress

The massive walls stretched for 740 m. Their height reached 12 m and width - 4.5 m. The height of the towers varied from 14 to 16 m, and their diameter reached 6 m. Each tower had four tiers for combat. The lowest tiers were covered with vaults lined with stones. And in other tiers there were convenient openings for supplying ammunition and loopholes.

In the Shlisselburg fort itself there was another powerful fortification - the citadel. Its three towers separated the vaulted galleries and the battle passage - vlaz. These galleries, protected on all sides, were used as warehouses for storing provisions, weapons and gunpowder. The canals surrounding the citadel and equipped with folding bridges also made it difficult to approach the fortress and also served as their own harbor.

Ruins of St. John's Cathedral

Oreshek Fortress in the history of the country

The Walnut fortress had an advantageous location and made the entire territory near Lake Ladoga practically inaccessible to the enemy. However, Swedish soldiers tried to capture the fort twice in the second half of the 16th century, but both times the assault attempts were unsuccessful.

The beginning of 1611 was no less stormy for the fortress. In February, hordes of Swedes again tried to encroach on the fortress. But they failed to quickly implement their plans. The Shlisselburg fort became the property of foreigners only in September. The capture of the fortification occurred after a two-month siege, when almost all the defenders of the fortification died due to disease and exhaustion. From a garrison of 1,300 soldiers, less than 100 exhausted fighters remained.

Memorial complex dedicated to the defense of Oreshok in 1941-1943.

In 1617, the Russians and Swedes signed a truce, according to which the Karelian Isthmus and the coast along the Gulf of Finland came into the possession of Sweden. The Swedes renamed Oreshek in their own way and called it Noteburg. The fort remained in the possession of foreigners for exactly 90 years. The new owners did not seek to carry out any construction work, they only slightly repaired the old walls and towers.

In 1700 the Northern War broke out and main task the sovereign was the return of the fortress to the Russian state. During the years of its stay with foreigners, it did not lose its former combat effectiveness, but its island location did not allow it to be taken by land. For this, a fleet was needed, but Peter I did not have one. But the persistent king did not deviate from his idea. He prepared in advance for the assault on Noteburg by ordering the construction of 13 ships.

New prison

The first detachments of militant Russians arrived at the walls of Noteburg on September 26, 1702, and the next day they began storming the fort. Without waiting for the Swedes to agree to his peaceful surrender, the Russians captured the fort that had previously belonged to them. However, its official transfer took place on October 14, 1702. By decree of Peter I, this remarkable date was immortalized in a medal, the inscription on which recalled the fortress’s presence with the enemy for 90 years. Then Noteburg received another name - Shlisselburg, that is, “key city”. The same name was given to the settlement, located on the left bank of the great Neva.

Prison interiors

Changes in architecture

The final transition to the ownership of the Russian state was marked for the fortress by changes in its architectural appearance. Earthen bastions were built right in front of the stone towers. Each such bastion opened towards the adjacent tower. Subsequently, due to constant erosion by water, it was decided to strengthen the bastions with stone. These works were carried out in the 1750-60s.

Secret house in the courtyard of the citadel

As the defensive power increased, buildings for prisons began to be erected inside the fort. In 1798, the so-called “Secret House” appeared here. It was separated from the common courtyard by huge walls, and since 1826 it became a gathering place for Decembrist prisoners awaiting their fate. Then he got a “neighbor”. It became the “New Prison”, intended for the imprisonment of Narodnaya Volya members. Therefore, the "Secret House" became the "Old Prison".

In 1887, Alexander Ulyanov, one of Lenin’s brothers, was executed in the courtyard of the citadel. Today a memorial plaque commemorates this event. With the end of 1917, the existence of the “Orekhovaya” prison came to an end. After 11 years, a museum was created in it. The new institution performed its functions until the onset of the Great Patriotic War. During the war years, thanks to the skillful actions of the local garrison, it was possible to liberate the city of Shlisselburg adjacent to the fortress, which was eventually renamed “Petrokrepost”. And finally, since 1966, the ancient fortress began to welcome guests again as a museum.

Royal Tower

The old fortress today

In the late 1960s, during archaeological excavations on the territory of the old fort, the foundations of ancient stone walls were discovered. A fragment of one of them and the Gate Tower are included in the modern exhibition of the museum.

24 km from St. Petersburg, at the source of the Neva from Lake Ladoga, is the ancient Russian fortress Oreshek. It was founded by Novgorodians in 1323, from 1612 it belonged to Sweden for almost a hundred years, then was recaptured by Peter I in 1702. Having lost its strategic importance, it turned into a prison for especially important criminals. Here the first wife of Peter I, Evdokia Lopukhina, Emperor John VI Antonovich, Decembrists, Narodnaya Volya, Social Revolutionaries, Poles who fought for the liberation of Poland were imprisoned. Alexander Ulyanov, the brother of V.I. Lenin, was executed here. In 1941-1943, a small garrison of the fortress defended it from the Nazis for more than 500 days and defended the “Road of Life”... Truly, the whole of Russian history came together in this place.

Oreshek Fortress (Shlisselburg)

History of the Oreshek fortress

In 1323, Prince Yuri Danilovich, the grandson of Alexander Nevsky, founded a fortress at the source of the Neva. It was built on Orekhovoy Island, so named for the abundance of hazel on its shores. At the same time, an “eternal peace” was concluded with Sweden. In 1352, stone walls and towers were built. Little remains of them today. Soon, on the shore, under the protection of the fortress, a city of the same name grew up, which now bears the name.

In the 15th century, after the Moscow Principality completely subjugated the Novgorod Republic, the Oreshek fortress was rebuilt. The Swedes repeatedly tried to take possession of this strategically important place. And finally, in May 1612, the fortress was starved out. According to legend, the defenders of Oreshok walled up an icon of the Kazan Mother of God into the wall as a sign that sooner or later the stronghold would again become Russian. The Swedes renamed the fortress Noteburg, which means “Walnut City”.

In October 1702, during the Northern War, after a 13-hour assault, Noteburg was taken. Initially, the Swedes had a clear advantage, and Peter the Great gave the command to retreat. However, Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Golitsyn, who led one of the detachments, disobeyed the tsar, answering: “I do not belong to you, sir, now I belong to God alone”. As a result of huge losses, the fortress was taken. “It’s true that this nut was very cruel, but, thank God, it was happily chewed up... Our artillery very miraculously corrected its work.”, wrote Peter. The fortress received a new name - Shlisselburg, which means “key city”. For from that time on the road to the mouth of the Neva was open.

Soon Shlisselburg lost its strategic importance and turned into a prison for especially dangerous criminals. Here, from 1725 to 1727, a “famous person” was imprisoned - the first wife of Peter the Great, Evdokia Lopukhin. In 1741, Biron was brought here, sentenced to death, but then pardoned by Anna Leopoldovna. In 1756, a “famous prisoner” was transported to Shlisselburg - Emperor John VI Antonovich, overthrown from the throne by Elizabeth Petrovna. In 1764, he was killed during an attempt to free him by Vasily Yakovlevich Mirovich (1740-1764).

In the “Secret House”, built in the Citadel at the end of the 18th century, many Decembrists were imprisoned: Ivan Pushchin, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, the Bestuzhev brothers, etc. Built in mid-19th century, many Narodnaya Volya members were imprisoned in the building of the New Prison. On May 8 (20), 1887, Alexander Ulyanov was executed in Shlisselburg. In 1911, the IV prison building, the largest, was built.

Shlisselburg Fortress before 1917

Oreshek played an important role in the Great Patriotic War. In 1941-1943, for 500 days, a small garrison of soldiers from the 1st division of the NKVD troops and sailors from the 409th naval battery of the Baltic Fleet kept Shlisselburg from being captured by the Nazis, protecting the “Road of Life” along which people were taken out of besieged Leningrad.

Toughie

Each building of the Oreshek fortress bears the imprint of a certain historical period, fateful events for Russia.

Sights of the Oreshek fortress

Since the Oreshek fortress is located on an island, you can only get there by water transport. Boats from Shlisselburg constantly go there. At the pier you can see the entrance to the Novoladozhsky bypass canal, which runs along the Volkhov River. The Neva in this place is wide, with a fast current.

Entrance to the Novoladozhsky Canal in Shlisselburg

Path to the Fortress

The fortress occupies the entire island. The ticket office is located just behind the pier. You can go alone, or with a guided tour.

Pier at the Oreshek fortress

An interesting brick with the imprint of a horseshoe was found at the entrance to the fortress:

The entrance to the fortress from the pier is through Sovereign's Tower:

Sovereign Tower

Gate in the Sovereign Tower

She is crowned key- symbol of Shlisselburg, Key City:

Key over the Sovereign Tower

Not far from the entrance there is a staircase to the fortress walls. Children are playing here now...

Fortress wall and Golovin Tower

... and in the past there was a nearby prison cell deposed Emperor Ivan Antonovich. He languished in complete solitude and gradually went crazy. In 1764, already during the reign of Catherine the Great, they tried to free him. However, the operation ended in failure, the emperor was killed, and the organizer of the conspiracy, Mirovich, was executed.

Door to the cell where John VI Antonovich was imprisoned

Inside the fortress, many buildings are in ruins. This is an echo of the Great Patriotic War. The Germans stood very close - 500 meters away, constantly shelling Oreshek. But they were never able to take her.

Traces of the Great Patriotic War...

Ruins of the IV Prison and Warden Buildings

Ruins of the I Prison Building

Near St. John's Cathedral has already been installed in our time memorial stone in honor of the Orekhovetsky Peace Treaty with Sweden.

Memorial sign dedicated to the Orekhovetsky Peace of 1323

Behind it, in front of the cathedral, under a canopy are hidden the remains of a fortress wall from Novgorod times. At one time it was explored by the expedition of A.N. Kirpichnikov (several years ago I worked under his leadership in).

Remains of the Novgorod wall near St. John's Cathedral

Remains of the fortress wall of the Novgorod period

The cathedral, which was badly damaged during the war, has been turned into a memorial monument to the defenders of the fortress. It was created using metal structures damaged by shells.

Memorial complex of St. John's Cathedral

Memorial to the defenders of the fortress during the Great Patriotic War

Monument to the defenders of the fortress in St. John's Cathedral

View of the Royal Tower from St. John's Cathedral

Memorial to the defenders of the fortress

Traces of bullets and shells

There is a flagpole on the bell tower of the cathedral. During the war, the defenders of the fortress raised a red banner every day, which the enemy tried to destroy.

John's Cathedral

On one of the structures is carved Oath of the soldiers of the Oreshek fortress:

We, the fighters of the Oreshek fortress, swear to defend it to the last.
None of us will leave her under any circumstances.
They leave the island: temporarily - sick and wounded, forever - dead.
We will stand here until the end.

Memorial complex in St. John's Cathedral

Nearby are military weapons:

Ship's gun on a pedestal mount

Divisional gun ZIS-3

At the memorial there are information boards telling about the history of the defense of Shlisselburg during the war. A little further away, on a hill, there is a cross. This is the grave of soldiers of the Semenovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments who fell during the assault on Noteburg in 1702.

Grave of soldiers of the Semenovsky and Preobrazhensky regiments who fell during the assault on Noteburg in 1702

In the northeastern corner of the fortress is the Citadel, a fortress within a fortress. It was once surrounded by a moat with water. Behind its walls in 1798, the “Secret House” was built, which later received the name “Old Prison”. From 1826 to 1834, Decembrists were imprisoned here, and from 1884 to 1906, revolutionaries sentenced to death.

Citadel

Secret House (Old Prison)

Room in the Old Prison (Secret House)

Old cell in the Old Prison

Cell in the Old Prison

Corridor in the Old Prison

In a small courtyard in front of the Old Prison, an apple tree planted by Frolenko, one of the Narodnaya Volya members, grows near the wall. Behind it, on the fortress wall, there is a memorial plaque informing that Alexander Ulyanov, accused of preparing an assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander III, was executed at this place. Who knows how our history would have turned out if it had not been for this assassination attempt and the ensuing massacre...

Courtyard of the Citadel

Place of execution of Alexander Ulyanov

On one of the walls of the Citadel there is a Polish memorial plaque:

Monument to Poles, prisoners of Shlisselburg

Backyard at the Citadel

The corner tower is called the Royal, or Naryshkinskaya; in front of it is the Naryshkin Bastion

Naryshkinskaya (Corner) Tower

Brickwork of the Naryshkin Tower

From the Citadel through a small gate you can exit to the banks of the Neva and Lake Ladoga. In the past, in some years, the prison administration made small concessions, allowing prisoners to go beyond the fortress walls and enjoy fresh air and water spaces.

The Royal Tower and the remains of the Naryshkin Bastion

Ladoga lake

Monument to revolutionaries on the bastion at the Royal Tower

Behind St. John's Cathedral there is the building of the “New Prison”, otherwise called “Narodnaya Volya”, because. Members of the Narodnaya Volya organization were imprisoned there. As a rule, they were kept in solitary confinement, without the right to communicate with other prisoners, read or write. Some couldn't stand it and died quickly. But there were also those who, after serving more than two decades, were then released and lived to a ripe old age.

The building of the New Prison and the grave of soldiers who died during the storming of the fortress in 1702.

New (People's Will) Prison

Inside the New (People's Will) Prison

Cell in the New (People's Will) Prison

Near St. John's Cathedral, a dilapidated building has been preserved, from which curved metal structures protrude. Looking at them you understand how strong the enemy fire was.

St. John's Cathedral and ruins of fortifications

Through the opening in the wall you can go out to the shore of Lake Ladoga.

Flag Tower and the shore of Lake Ladoga

There is a staircase in the Golovkina Tower that allows you to climb the fortress wall.

Flag Tower

Panorama of the Oreshek fortress

Base

Panorama of the Oreshek fortress

old tower

Lichens

Golovkin Tower

Window in the tower

Near the Sovereign Tower, you can climb a closed staircase to the fortress wall, from where you can see panoramas of the source of the Neva and the ruins of the IV prison building. The fortress wall is being reconstructed and over time it will be possible to walk along it completely.

Ladder

Fortress wall

Gate lattice lifting mechanism

Source of the Neva

A wide panorama of the fortress buildings opens from the fortress wall. Looking at the ruins, you realize how strong the enemy fire was.

Ruins of the Overseer Corps

Fortress wall and ruins of the IV prison building

Ruins of the IV prison building

Traces of war

Panorama of the Oreshek fortress

Ruins of the IV prison building

And now, the time has come to leave the Shlisselburg-Oreshek fortress.

Inside the Sovereign Tower

Golovina Tower

Fortress Oreshek

How to get to the Oreshek fortress (Shlisselburg), map

By car: from St. Petersburg along the M-18 “Kola” highway, after the Ladoga Bridge turn right, then follow the sign to Shlisselburg. The length of the route is about 32 km. Next, cross to Orekhovy Island.

By public transport:

• From St. Petersburg: metro station Dybenko Street, then bus number 575, metro station Rybatskoye, then bus number 440 to Shlisselburg. Motor ships depart from the Shlisselburg pier every 10 minutes.
• From Finlyandsky Station by electric train to Petrokrepost station (Morozov village). Next is the crossing on the motor ship "Verny". The ship departs every 40 minutes.
• On Meteora from St. Petersburg to the Oreshek fortress and back.

© , 2009-2019. Copying and reprinting of any materials and photographs from the website in electronic publications and printed publications is prohibited.